He went back inside, and I followed him, Suzie’s nails clicking on the treads already marred by her ups and downs. We went our separate ways, into our apartments. It grew dark, and I knew I should think about eating something, but I wasn’t hungry. The streetlights came on. Mary Rae tipped her head to meet my gaze, her pretty hair iced over. Though I wanted to ignore her, her continued presence was too baffling. I went quietly down the staircase, unused to living in such close proximity to strangers and leery of calling attention to myself. I stepped onto the porch, and then down to the sidewalk. Mary Rae began to move away from me, leading me along, stopping when I didn’t keep up. I was afraid of getting lost. Though I had my phone, and it continued to pick up a signal, at that time I knew no one I could call, and this was before phones could direct you anywhere you wanted to go. Despite this I kept following her.
I pretended I was simply out for a walk on a late summer evening. I tried to focus on the trees arching over the sidewalk, the quaintness of the houses with their front porches, imagining how I would describe things to Del in a letter. The air felt cooler and the breeze, which had once seemed to promise a storm, kicked the leaves. We walked down one street, then another—Geneva, Cascadilla. Students had moved in, had hung their posters, had laid down their rugs, and were acclimating to the people around them. It didn’t escape me that my fresh start so far involved none of those things; rather than making new friends, I was following a dead girl. I approached a party on a candlelit porch—laughter, banter, the group partially hidden by tall shrubbery. Mary Rae stopped walking and paused, lingering, as if she longed to join them; as if she sensed I, too, wished to go in.
I stepped back into the shadows of the shrubbery, as she did, listening. A woman laughed, softly.
“It’s a beautiful night,” she said. “God, I wish it would stay like this and never get cold.”
Someone set a bottle of beer on a table. “You’d get sick of the sameness,” a man said.
“I’m happy to be here with all of you. I’m just happy to be alive,” the woman said.
There was a hush then, the laughter dying away. “Someone walked over my grave,” the man said.
“Oh, stop,” another woman said, her voice garrulous. “You’re all so superstitious.”
“I wish I would stop feeling guilty,” the first woman said.
“For what?” the other woman said.
“Well, for Rae.”
I felt a sudden apprehension. Mary Rae must have been the “Rae” the woman referred to, though her face showed no real emotion, just a placid, glazed-over expression, as if recollecting something from long ago.
“You doing okay there, William?” a man said. “You’re pretty quiet.”
“Yeah,” William said. And then he stood and looked out of the screened enclosure. He looked past Mary Rae to me, standing there on the sidewalk. I’m not sure why I didn’t flee. Did I think that I, too, couldn’t be seen?
“Oh, hello,” he said.
“Hi,” I said. “Sorry, I was looking for my cat.”
Del would have laughed at me. “That’s all you could come up with?” she would have said.
Then the man, William, turned to the group, some of whom had risen from their seats on the dim porch to see who he was talking to.
“Anyone see a cat?” he said, his voice teasing. I suspected he didn’t believe me. He looked back at me—for some reason I still hadn’t moved.
“What does it look like?” he said. “What breed? Persian? Manx? Maine Coon? Abyssinian? Siamese?”
“Just a tabby.” Could I have told him right then I’d been following his dead friend? What would that have accomplished? I looked toward Mary Rae, but she was gone. William raised his beer to me. “Want to join us?” he said.
Thunder sounded off in the distance, and then the porch door opened, and William stepped onto the sidewalk in front of me. Again, I smelled that pre-storm charge in the air. My grandfather would open the front door wide and stand before the screen, calling us all to him, and telling us to “Breathe. Breathe. Smell that?” Outside my grandparents’ house, the horse chestnut leaves would be torn from the branches. The shrubs would buckle. The clouds would unfurl like great gray tongues. Our mother and grandmother would stand far behind us, safe in the hallway’s shadows. “Get away from there,” our mother would hiss, and we four girls would feel superior to the panic in her voice.
“You don’t want to be struck by lightning,” William said.
He was just being funny, but the mention of the lightning and the sudden disappearance of Mary Rae, the void she had left, made me uneasy.
“I’ll be fine if I avoid trees, high houses, running water, and barns,” I said.
“Or, you could come inside.”
“According to Ben Franklin, to be safest indoors you’re supposed to lie in a silken hammock in the middle of the house.” I sounded odd, I knew that, but William laughed.
“We’ll all have to face the risk then. No silken hammocks here.”
The breeze buckled the porch screens. William’s friends had grown quiet. “My grandfather sold lightning rods.”
“You seem to have the pitch down,” he said. “You’ve got me nervous.”
I laughed, then. We looked at each other in the dark. I could see little of his face, his eyes.
“I’d better get going,” I said. “But thanks.”
I headed back the way I’d come, ignoring the voices that started up on the porch behind me. When I spun around once, playfully, William was still there, standing on the sidewalk, watching me go.
5