Free The Raising by Laura Kasischke Page B

from the passenger seat. “I killed my girlfriend.” He even managed a laugh. Beyond his mother, he could see her new boyfriend’s shadow moving around behind the curtains of his parents’ bedroom.
    “Lynette, you’re right about one thing,” Craig’s father had said, rolling the car window up as he said it. “No one gives a flying fuck what you think.”
    Craig’s mother started screaming at the Subaru as they pulled away from the curb, but his father had turned up his Vivaldi, and Craig didn’t hear from her again until the next week, just before they headed back out to the Midwest, when she came by his father’s apartment and said—subdued, choked with emotion, spilling tears all over the place—“Just come back the second you can’t stand it anymore,” as if it were a foregone conclusion that it would come to that. “If . . . relapse.”
    “And do what?” Craig had asked. “Come back and live with you and Scar and ‘Uncle Doug,’ work at the ski resort?”
    His mother turned her back then, and walked out the front door, down the stairs, and crisply back to her car, sobbing openly the whole way, as other apartment dwellers passed her in the parking lot and Craig watched from the balcony. For a second it had crossed his mind to run out there after her, tackle her, press his face into her chest, and sob, too, but she was already driving away in her Lexus before he could.
    N ow he was back, and wondering if she’d been right.
    He shouldn’t be here.
    They’d let him back in, but that didn’t mean he belonged here.
    Even Dr. Truby had seemed worried, and Dr. Truby had been, from the beginning, all about self-empowerment and complete recovery.
    “You may . . . begin . . . to have frightening recall,” he’d said. “Please phone me if you do.”
    The last time Craig had met with the shrink it was a hundred degrees outside and the air-conditioning in the office was blowing in the smell of an overheated refrigerator. He knew Dr. Truby was about to ask him, for the ten millionth time, the same question:
    “Tell me, Craig, anything you can recall at this time about the accident.”
    Craig had looked down at his lap, as he always did, and then rubbed his eyes where he saw, against his lids, a woman’s face.
    Unfamiliar.
    It was round as a moon. She was speaking to him in a foreign language, but somehow he understood what she was saying:
    Don’t move the girl.
    Craig looked up at Dr. Truby. He said, “I think there was a lady there.”
    Dr. Truby nodded. His head was shaved, and so perfectly shaped it seemed to have been made with the idea of shaving it in mind.
    “And this lady . . . ?” Dr. Truby moved his hand through the air, churning it in his own direction.
    Craig thought for a minute, and then said, “She told me not to move Nicole.”
    “And then you . . . ?” Again, the paddling. Pulling him in.
    Craig had looked down at Dr. Truby’s shoes. Slippers? Loafers. They looked soft and suede, not like something you could wear to walk on pavement.
    “And then . . . ?”
    But Craig had no words for what came after that.
    After that, there were hands on him. A blow to the stomach. His head and ears were ringing. And water. Was he being baptized? There was a needle in his arm. A man in a blue uniform shouting at some flashing lights. Someone kicked him hard in the ass, and then he was stumbling. And all the time, he was trying to ask about Nicole, but the words came out so garbled he knew no one could understand him. Someone wanted to know if Craig knew his own name, and where he was, but when Craig tried to form, in his mouth, the shape of the words of her name, someone said, in a soothing voice, “You shouldn’t think about that now. You should rest. Nicole is dead.”
    “I don’t know,” Craig had said, and Dr. Truby, who must have been waiting for a long time for Craig to say more than this, leaned back in his chair, looked at the ceiling, and sighed.

9
    M ira always