Shelly typed Josie Reilly into Google.
It was Monday, and Josie hadn’t made it into work at all. Shelly had come into the office to a raspy message on her machine in the morning:
“Hey, this is Josie (cough, cough) and I’m really sick. I can’t come in. I’m really sorry. I’m going to Health Services now. I’ll be in on Wednesday I’m sure.”
There were an astonishing number of Google hits.
Of course, Josie Reilly wasn’t a completely unique name. One Josefina/Josie Reilly seemed to have been involved somehow in the Salem witch trials. Another Josie Reilly was a CEO of a large, bankrupt corporation. There was also a long list of genealogical connections—Reillys and Rileys and Reileys going back several centuries, traversing the Atlantic, claiming to be related to one another, as if it mattered. (What, Shelly always wondered, did people feel they gained by claiming kinship with strangers, alive or dead?)
But then her Josie Reilly rose to the surface, incontrovertibly the coed sorority sister from Grosse Isle, the one Shelly had hired as a work-study student for the Chamber Music Society:
DEAD FRESHMAN’S ROOMMATE SPEAKS OUT AGAINST DRUNK DRIVER.
There she was—Josie, in all her sloe-eyed Black Irish beauty, holding a microphone on the steps of the Llewellyn Roper Library. The sun shone down on her inky hair, which matched the black halter-top dress she wore. Behind her, the familiar apple tree that seemed to grow out of the foundation of the library (the one they were always threatening to rip out because it was fucking up the plumbing) wasn’t yet in bloom.
The Dead Freshman’s Roommate?
Shelly clearly remembered asking Josie of Nicole Werner, “Did you know her?” And the shrug. We all knew her. She and I rushed and pledged at the same time, so . . .
Josie had said nothing about being her roommate. Nothing whatsoever. Nothing about standing outside the Llewellyn Roper Library in May, speaking out against drunk driving and about her dead roommate.
Why?
That night, after a distracted glass of Cabernet Sauvignon and a cursory page-through of the New York Times, Shelly called Rosemary.
For over two decades she had spoken to Rosemary on the phone every few days, and a bit more lately, since Rosemary’s eldest son had become a teenager and there was so much to say about this terrifying passage. For the first half of the conversation, Shelly listened to Rosemary rail against the public schools and the fact that they allowed fourteen-year-old children to neck on the benches outside the building during lunch period.
“Can you imagine if we’d tried to get away with that in middle school?” Rosemary asked.
She wasn’t expecting an answer, so Shelly didn’t say that, actually, she could, and that she remembered, herself, the spring of eighth grade, meeting Tony Lipking (ironically named, since he was her first kiss) out in the parking lot every lunch hour it wasn’t raining, and the warm feeling of Tony’s Ford’s grille against her thighs as he held her between himself and that grille with his face locked onto hers for the entire hour, when she should have been eating her mother’s turkey sandwich and carrot sticks.
When Rosemary was done railing, Shelly told her the story of Josie, and how she’d Googled her on the Internet and discovered her as Nicole Werner’s grieving roommate.
“Why wouldn’t she have told me that, when I asked? Why would it be a secret, especially after I told her that I was at the accident?”
Rosemary seemed to consider this for quite a while, although Shelly could also hear a sink running in the background. (Often it seemed that Rosemary was multitasking while they talked.) “Traumatized?” Rosemary finally offered. “Or maybe she thinks it’s controversial? Maybe she doesn’t want to get into it? Trying to get past all that?”
“No,” Shelly said. She didn’t even have to think about it. “That’s not this girl. This girl would be thrilled to get controversial. Believe me.”
Shelly went on to tell Rosemary everything she knew about Josie Reilly—the boys waiting in the office, the early departures, late arrivals, the excuses. She described the spaghetti-strap tops she wore. The little silver sandals and the black flats with frilly bows. Jeremy, Shelly’s cat, was licking his catnip mouse on the braided rug at her feet as Shelly detailed the habits of her work-study student and this odd mystery surrounding her.
“Shelly?” Rosemary asked when Shelly was done. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Of course,” Shelly said.
Rosemary lowered her voice, hesitated, and then asked, “Are you, you know, in love with this girl?”
“What?” Shelly was surprised to find her pulse racing, her cheeks and chest prickling with heat. “Why would you ask that?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, hon. I’m not accusing you of anything! I don’t know,” Rosemary said. She laughed nervously. “There’s just something in your voice. You seem so—intrigued.”
“I can be intrigued and not be in love,” Shelly said.
“Well, of course you can,” Rosemary said. “Forget I said anything, okay? Just forget it. But, you know, if you decide you are in love with her, you call me before—”
“Rosemary, Jesus. She’s not even twenty years old. I—”
“Like I said,” Rosemary said, “just forget it. I never said it. You’re right. Ridiculous Rosemary. Tell me a joke or something, okay? Or, like, what did you have for dinner tonight? See any good movies lately?”