The Raising

by Laura Kasischke

  Perry got out of the car and slammed the door loudly behind him (more warning), and then he took a slow step toward the door, which Mrs. Werner had opened before he’d even had a chance to knock—and although she looked happy and flushed (just as he remembered her from years before, bustling around her restaurant, bringing special treats of dark bread and homemade jam over to the tables where “my daughters’ chums!” sat), she did not look pleased to see him.

  Perry glanced beyond her to the place where the family had been gathered, but there was no one in the living room now. Still, he could see a bright red electrical dot glowing over the keys of the Hammond organ.

  The Hammond organ was on.

  Perry thought he could hear it humming when Mrs. Werner, reluctantly, it seemed, stepped aside to let him in.

  “Nice to see you, Perry. How are your folks?”

  “They’re fine, Mrs. Werner. I—”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “I just came by to say hello. I—”

  “I was just getting ready to go out, but if you’d like to sit down for a second—”

  Mrs. Werner pointed to a white couch. There was a sheet of plastic over it, and Perry remembered the long-haired black cat, Grouch, who’d hissed at him once when he’d knelt down to pet it, and how Nicole had laughed like crazy. (“God, he likes everybody. He’s never done that to anyone! That’s why we call him Grouch.”) Perry had never bothered to ask her if she was just kidding—if, in truth, that cat hissed at everyone and she was being ironic, or if it was true, that the cat really was friendly, and the name Grouch was ironic. Now he wished he knew.

  “Do you still have Grouch?” he asked Mrs. Werner—stupidly, he thought, as soon as the words had left his mouth. (After all that had happened, he was asking about their cat?)

  “Why do you ask?” Mrs. Werner said, sitting down in a matching white armchair, also covered in plastic, across a glass-topped coffee table from him. Perhaps it had been a stupid question, Perry thought, but he was still surprised by her response, and all he could think of to say was, “I remember him.”

  “Well, yes, we still have Grouch. He’s old. But a cat can live for over twenty years.”

  “Oh, that’s great,” Perry said.

  “How are your parents?” Mrs. Werner asked again.

  “They’re fine, Mrs. Werner. They’re great. I mean, I haven’t seen them yet, but Thanksgiving’s just around—”

  “You came up to Bad Axe to visit us?” Mrs. Werner asked, opening her eyes wide, her expression alarmed. Perry thought she looked as beautiful as any of her daughters ever had. Her face seemed nearly unlined, bright with good health. Her hair was gray, but it wasn’t the dry gray he remembered from the funeral, the last time he’d seen her. Now it looked soft. It fell in silver waves around her shoulders.

  “Well, no,” Perry said. “But since I was here, I wanted to say hello.”

  “Thank you,” Mrs. Werner said, and clapped her hands on her knees, as if that sealed the deal. End of discussion. “That’s very kind of you, Perry. We always thought a great deal of you, and also your parents. We’ll miss them.”

  “You’ll miss them?”

  Mrs. Werner looked at Perry curiously.

  “Oh,” she said. “I assumed you knew, that it was the reason for your lovely visit. We’ve sold the restaurant. We’re moving to Arizona. In two weeks.”

  “In two weeks?”

  “Yes. I know some people think it seems sudden, but we’ve been considering retirement for a long time. Mr. Werner and I are not spring chickens, and, well—”

  “Of course.” Perry was being polite. What he felt was confusion, and a strange disbelief. Who was he to question the plans and the motives of these people? But all these generations in Bad Axe? His first school had been Werner Elementary. Now they were moving to Arizona? In two weeks?

  Mrs. Werner stood up. She said, “I certainly appreciate this chance to say good-bye, Perry. It was delightful to see you, and if you ever get to Arizona—”

  “Where in Arizona?”

  Mrs. Werner cleared her throat and said, “That’s yet to be determined, Perry. Probably Phoenix. Of course, I’ll send word to all the good folks up here when we have a permanent address.”

  The smile on her face was anxious, but not entirely false. She was happy to see Perry, he could tell by the warmth of her embrace, and she was sorry about something, too, but when he asked if he could use her bathroom before he left, the smile evaporated.

  She stood looking at him for several seconds, as if she expected him to take the request back. When he didn’t, she said, “Well, dear, let me just take a peek in there first to make sure there aren’t any towels on the floor. You know, we’ve gotten sloppy, getting ready for the move, and I wouldn’t—”

  Before Perry could object, say he really didn’t care about the state of their bathroom, she disappeared through a door in the hallway attached to the living room, and when she returned, she said, “It’s fine. Go ahead,” and Perry stepped past her, closed the door behind him.

  There was light blue tile. Seashells on the wallpaper, just like the wallpaper his mother had hung one Saturday afternoon a few summers back (probably bought it at the same store: a sale, a promotion, at the same time). As quickly as he could, Perry got on his hands and knees on the white carpeting and began to search for anything other than black cat hairs (Grouch: they were everywhere). He couldn’t find anything. But when he stood back up, he saw it: a hairbrush on the shelf above the toilet tank. A brush with a tortoiseshell handle and white bristles. It was small, the kind of thing he could slip into his jacket pocket. He looked at it and saw that it was a treasure trove: There were long blond strands of hair floating ethereally out of it, and shorter gray hairs mixed in with those. A feminine nest, something made out of silk and breath. He took a Kleenex out of a box on the sink, wrapped it around the head of the brush, and put it into his pocket just before flushing the toilet, clearing his throat, opening the bathroom door, and stepping back into the living room.

  “Okay?” Mrs. Werner asked. She held the front door open for him, despite the cold wind blowing through it, and there was no mistaking her fervent desire that, now, he leave.

  Perry reached out and extended a hand to Mrs. Werner, who took it in hers and squeezed with genuine warmth, until he looked down, and she must have noticed him noticing the amber ring on her finger (it had not, he felt sure, been there when she’d taken his hand when he first arrived), and then she was pulling her hand back and closing the door without saying good-bye.

  He went back to the car, walking as slowly as he could. He wanted to turn back, wanted to think up some good reason that he would. Was there any conceivable thing he’d “forgotten” to say to the parents of the girl at whose funeral he’d been a pallbearer only nine months before? Maybe We’re thinking Nicole is still alive? Or We think your daughter may have risen from the dead?

  No.

  He had to resign himself to getting back into Professor Blackhawk’s car, and starting it up, and driving it off.

  But Perry had driven only a few blocks (past the Hollidays’—one of whose sons, the last Perry had heard, was a homeless violinist in Santa Monica—and around the corner on which Mrs. Samm lived with the children of her youngest daughter, who’d been killed in motorcycle accident) when he pulled to the curb again and turned off the engine:

  A whole group of girls had been gathered around that organ, which Mr. Werner had been playing, and when they’d realized someone was stopping by, they’d fled.

  It was a small house. Three bedrooms? Was the basement even finished? The kitchen was small enough, as he recalled it, to have been called a kitchenette. They had to have gone to the farthest bedroom. They had to have been holding their breaths. Had they sat at the edges of the bed, holding their fingers to their lips to remind themselves to stay silent?

  Why?

  It would have been crazy.

  If they’d wanted to avoid him, all
they’d have had to do was have Mrs. Werner say at the door, “We’re busy at the moment, Perry, or I’d invite you in—”

  No.

  They didn’t want him to know they were there.

  Or was he the one who was crazy?

  Perry got out of the car then and started to walk back to the Werners’.

  90

  Ted Dientz reminded Mira of a gym teacher she’d had, one of the few junior high teachers who’d seemed to really love his job, feel serious passion for his subject. Sometimes, even now, Mira thought of him while teaching one of her own classes, remembering the way he’d stood in front of a slide projection of an illustration of the muscles of the human body.

  Rippling, himself, with muscles, Mr. Baker would point out the best ones, the ones that could be developed with “so little work you won’t even know you’re doing it.” The benefits of this, the beauty of weightlifting, sometimes seemed to overwhelm him as he tried to describe it. (“You won’t believe it. One day you won’t even be able to lift something, and in a short time, you won’t even feel like you’re lifting it.”) And although Mira had never become interested in weightlifting, she’d learned something about enthusiasm from Mr. Baker, and how a teacher can convey a sense of it to his students. It was Mr. Baker she’d thought of in her own freshman Latin class upon learning that the word enthusiasmus meant “inspired by a god.”

  In the case of Ted Dientz, there was no doubt that it was the God of the Underworld who possessed him, but Mira understood as well as anyone what that was like. When he brought up the envelope with the bloodstain card from the basement, he said, “You know there’s very little that a few blood cells or a strand of hair can’t tell us any longer. You could be a master of disguise, but if I could compare a single one of your cells to a strand of your mother’s hair, I would instantly know who you are.”

  He let Mira take the envelope from his hands, and said, “Go ahead. It’s in sealant. You can’t hurt it.”

  Mira opened the envelope and slid out the card. It was a little bigger than a business card. The top half of it was white, and it had Nicole’s name and birth and death dates written on it in black capital letters, in a felt-tip pen. The bottom half was purple with a dime-size circle in the center, and in the center of that lay a dark and ragged little stain.

  Ted Dientz tapped it and said, “That’s our girl.”

  Mira looked at the little stain. Nicole, if it was Nicole.

  “Everything there we need to know. Everything we’d need to bring her back to life, really, if we had just a bit more know-how. Well, someday!” He chuckled, and then he took the card from her, tucked it back into the envelope, and held it on his lap. It stayed there between them like a third person—not a ghost, exactly, just a presence—as they talked about Mira’s research, her book, her travels, and his travels.

  Ted Dientz had, himself, as she had, visited Bran Castle in the Carpathian Mountains.

  “Of course, my wife and I didn’t tell the folks around here that we were visiting Dracula’s castle. It would have looked bad for business.”

  “So what did you tell them?” Mira asked, before realizing it might embarrass him, his lie.

  “Well, we said we were on a mission trip. Orphanages and such.” (And indeed he blushed from his necktie to his forehead as he told her.) “But you can imagine my interest! As I can tell you understand, as so few people do, it’s not a morbid fascination; it’s a scientific one. I’m not interested in vampires, but I am interested in legends surrounding death. I have, myself, witnessed some extraordinary things.”

  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 assisted 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 shore, 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, hello,” 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 shit,” 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 fuck 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 muffled 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 God,” she was saying. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I’ll be right back. I’ll get some towels.”

  Craig felt bad about it—he would ruin her towels with his bloody nose, he might stain her sheets with the blood r
unning 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 God!”

  “It’s just a bloody 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.