Shelly didn’t bother to get out of her robe and slippers for four days except when she had to take them off to get into bed. Eventually she’d have to go to the store, she knew, mostly for cat food and litter, but today she thought she might be able to get away with one more twenty-four-hour robe-and-slipper stint. She turned on the bedside lamp and picked up the book she hadn’t been able to read one page of in all the hours she’d spent with it open in front of her face since the afternoon she’d been fired.
That afternoon she’d come home and unplugged the phone, and she hadn’t turned on the computer even once. A few times there’d been knocks on the door, and once it had sounded as if someone had thrown a brick or a dead body onto her porch, but still she hadn’t stepped outside to look, or even parted the curtains. The mail came through a slot in the door, so she didn’t have to worry about it piling up outside and the neighbors wondering if she’d slipped in the bathtub. She didn’t subscribe to a newspaper. She just let the bills and flyers and whatever else came through the slot pile up on the floor where it fell.
Jeremy thought he’d died and gone to heaven. Finally, he had a companion all day and all night—a companion who slept even more hours than he did.
Still, Shelly wasn’t so foolish as to think she would stop living. Sooner or later she was going to have to pay the bills lying scattered on her floor. Sooner or later she would have to put the house up for sale, pack all of her things, and move somewhere she could get a job.
But not today.
Today would be another stare-blankly-into-Cold Mountain-day.
Back in the last months of her marriage to Tim, Shelly had lived for the few days a month when he’d go away for work or on one of his fishing weekends and she could pull on the robe (it was, actually, the same robe she wore now) and pull down the shades, and crawl into their bed.
She’d never thought of herself as depressed back then. She had not yet seen the now-ubiquitous list of the symptoms of depression in magazines, at the top of which was always something like “can’t drag your ass out of bed.” She’d ask Tim to call her when he was about an hour from home, and told him it was so she could have something on the stove for him—when, in truth, it was so she could get herself up, and shower, and dress, and be ready to face the world in the guise of Tim again when he stomped through the door.
Now there was no one to drag herself out of bed for, to impress or appease—although Shelly knew that if this went on much longer (the phone unplugged, the cell phone off, not even checking her email), Rosemary would become alarmed, and come by.
But Shelly had gone longer than a week in the past without talking to Rosemary. Rosemary would assume for a while that Shelly was just busy with work. Rosemary had no idea that Shelly had been fired. Shelly had not mentioned Josie to Rosemary again after the phone conversation during which Rosemary had asked, “Are you in love with this girl?” She’d planned to tell her, eventually, but hadn’t gotten around to that yet. Let alone the sex. Let alone the photographs. Let alone the disciplinary meeting with the dean. There would be, as they said, a lot of catching up to do.
Shelly rolled onto her side, and Jeremy growled a little, dreamily, and rolled onto his side as well.
Jesus.
And to add to the horror, the shame, Shelly found herself, each time she closed her eyes, to her own shock and amazement, instead of thinking about the public humiliation, instead of grieving the loss of her livelihood and her identity and her job and her life—thinking instead about Josie Reilly.
About her clavicle. About the shadows gathered there in the moonlight in Shelly’s bed. About those white teeth locked onto her lower lip, damp and shining in the morning light.
Like her cat, Shelly growled a little, and put her face in her hands, and remembered the last phone call she’d answered from the university administration. “We want to be certain you understand that there is to be no communication between you and the student in question. Any attempts to contact her may result in legal action on her part or on ours.”
Shelly had held the phone away from her ear then, and muttered, “Of course,” thinking, Oh my God, as she hung up. I’ve become the kind of lecherous vermin they fear will call and stalk a student.
But even as she was thinking it, Shelly was flipping her cell phone open to the address book, scrolling down to Josie’s number, uttering a little cry before she snapped it closed.
Never again even to speak with the stupid little bitch, the most beautiful creature in this whole exhausted world?
Shit.
Now she shoved off the blankets, put her feet on the floor.
What did she really have to lose?
They’d told her she could not attempt to contact the “student in question,” but they had not told her she could not sit in the Starbucks that she happened to know for a fact the student in question visited ten times a day.