The Raising Read Free Page B

parted around the couple, and then around Perry, Craig, and his father.
    “Love ya,” Craig’s father said, and clapped Craig to him, patting him hard on the back.
    “I love you, too,” Craig said.
    They held the embrace for at least three seconds, long enough for Craig to notice, just beyond his father’s shoulder, hanging above the couple kissing, far over the place where the streetlamp should have been shining, the moon, which appeared to be made of either solid rock or the softest of human flesh, floating in an ink-blue sky.

2
    S helly Lockes called the newspaper after the first article, full of inaccuracies about the accident, came out, and although the reporter to whom her call was forwarded assured her that he would “set the record straight on the details of the accident as reported in our paper right away,” no corrections ever appeared.
    After that, Shelly asked to speak to the newspaper’s editor, and her call was passed on by a receptionist, who said, “Well, he doesn’t take calls from the public, but this person is one of our editors, and she could speak to you.”
    On the phone, this person sounded like a child:
    “You mean, like, you were the first one at the scene of the accident?”
    “Yes. I was. Why hasn’t anyone spoken to me? My name’s part of the public record. The paramedics and the police took all my information. I’d like to correct the record.”
    The editor stammered a bit before she said, “Wow. Okay. Well, I’ll have someone call you this afternoon.”
    No one called, and the next day, again, there was a front-page story that described how the girl had been found in a “lake of blood” in the backseat of the car. How she’d been thrown there by the impact. How she hadn’t been wearing a seat belt. How she’d already bled to death before the ambulance arrived, and that she was unrecognizable. That her face had hit the front windshield, and then the rear window. That her roommate had identified her at the morgue from the black dress and jewelry she’d been wearing that evening, and that the boyfriend who’d been driving the vehicle was found hours later wandering down a rural road, covered in his girlfriend’s blood.
    The newspaper said that medical professionals could only wonder at how he’d managed to stumble so far with a broken arm, a dislocated shoulder, a closed-head injury, and a ruptured spleen.
    But Shelly Lockes had been there.
    She’d called the ambulance herself within minutes of the accident. She’d waded through a ditch full of water and stood above the boy and girl. The girl had been thrown into the grass. She was not in the car. The light of the full moon had been plenty bright for Shelly to see it all—and she knew for a fact that the only blood at the scene had been her own.
    The gash to her hand.
    Admittedly, it was a nasty gash. She’d needed stitches, and bandages, and if she’d ever played handball or mandolin, she’d probably never be able to play again. The scar still surprised her every time she looked at it. How had she not felt the cut when it happened? It wasn’t until she was in the Emergency Room, holding it up, wrapped in her own sweatshirt, that her hand had started to hurt like hell.
    But it had not created a “lake of blood.”
    There had been no lake of blood.
    “Maybe they’re all like this,” her friend Rosemary suggested. “Maybe every goddamn article about every event in the local newspaper is completely made up, but we don’t know because we didn’t witness most of them. ‘A lake of blood’ sells a lot more newspapers than no blood.”
    The next article described the “first person at the scene of the accident” as a middle-aged woman who came upon it hours after it had happened, and made a call to 911 but left the scene before the paramedics arrived, and could not be reached by police. After that article, Shelly called the newspaper and the police.
    “Not one word of what’s being reported is accurate. This