The Best American Mystery Stories 2013

So Near Any Time Always by Joyce Carol Oates

FROM Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

OH! HE WAS SMILING at me.

Was he smiling-at me?

Quick then looking away, looking down at my notebook-where I’d been taking notes for a science-history paper-while spread about me on the highly polished table were opened volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica, World Book of Science, Science History Digest.

A hot blush rose into my face. I could not bring myself to glance up, to see the boy at a nearby table, similarly surrounded by spread-open books, staring at me.

Though now I was aware of him. Of his quizzical-friendly stare.

Thinking, I will not look up. He’s just teasing.

In 1977: still an era of libraries.

In the suburban branch library that had been a millionaire’s mansion in the nineteenth century. In the high-ceilinged reference room. Shelves of books, gilt-glinting titles, brilliant sunshine through the great octagonal window so positioned in the wall that, seated at one of the reference tables, you could see only the sky through the inset glass panes like an opened fan.

Will not look up, yet my eyes lifted involuntarily.

Still he was smiling at me. A stranger: a few years older than I was.

Never smile or speak to strange men, but this was a boy, not a man.

I wondered if he was a student at St. Francis de Sales Academy for Boys, a private Catholic school where tuition was said to be as high as college tuition and where the boys, unlike boys at my school, had to wear white shirts, ties, and jackets to class.

Smiling at me in a way that was so tender, so kindly, so familiar.

As if, though I didn’t know him, he knew me. As if, though I didn’t know him, yet somehow I did know him, but had forgotten as you feel the tug of a lost dream, unable to retrieve it, yet yearning to retrieve it, like groping in darkness, in a room that should be familiar to you.

He knows me! He understands.

I was sixteen. I was a high school junior. I was young for my age, it was said-not to me, directly-which translated into an adult notion of underdeveloped sexuality, emotional immaturity, childishness.

It wasn’t so unusual that a boy might smile at me, or a man might smile at me, if I was alone. A young girl alone will always attract a certain kind of quick appraising (male) attention.

If whoever it was hadn’t seen my face clearly, or my skin.

Seen from a little distance, I looked like any girl. Or almost.

Seen from the front, I looked like a girl of whom relatives say, Her best feature is her smile!

Or, If only she would smile just a little more-she’d be pretty.

Which wasn’t true, but well-meaning. So I tried not to absolutely hate the relative who said it.

This boy was no one I’d ever encountered before, I was sure. If I had, I would have remembered him.

He was very handsome! I thought. Though I scarcely dared to look at him.

Mostly I was conscious of his round, gold-rimmed glasses, which gave him a dignified appearance. Inside the lenses his eyes were just perceptibly magnified, which gave them a look of blurred tenderness.

His face was angular and sharp-boned and his hair was scrupulously trimmed with a precise part on one side of his head, the way men wore their hair years ago; unlike most guys his age, anyway most guys you’d see in Strykersville, he was wearing an actual shirt, not a T-shirt-a short-sleeved shirt that looked like it might be expensive.

Smiling at me in this tentative way to signal that if I was wary of him, or frightened of him, it was okay-it was cool. He wouldn’t bother me further.

He’d been taking notes in a notebook, too. Now he returned to his work, studious and intense, as if he’d forgotten me. I saw that he was left-handed-leaning over the library table with his left arm crooked at the elbow so he could write with that hand.

A curious thing: he’d removed his wristwatch to position it on the tabletop, so that he could see the time at a glance. As if his time in the library might be precious and limited and he feared it spilling out into the diffuse atmosphere of the public library, in which, like sea creatures washed ashore, eccentric-looking individuals, virtually always male, seemed drawn to pursue obsessive reference projects.

So I continued with my diligent note-taking. Amphibian ancestors. Evolution. Prehistoric amphibians: why gigantic? Present-day amphibians: why dwindling in numbers?

Trying not to appear self-conscious. With this unknown boy less than fifteen feet away facing me as in a mirror.

A hot blush in my cheeks. And I regretted having bicycled to the library without taking time to fasten my hair back into a ponytail so now it was straggly and windblown.

My hair was fair brown with a kinky little wave. Very like the boy’s hair, except his was trimmed so short.

A strange coincidence! I wondered if there were others.

My note-taking was scrupulous. If the boy glanced up, he would see how serious I was.

… environmental emergency, fate of small amphibians worldwide…

… exact causes unknown but scientists suggest…

… radical changes in climate, environment… invasive organisms like fungi …

Then, abruptly-this was disappointing!-after less than ten minutes the boy with the gold-rimmed glasses decided to leave: got to his feet-tall, lanky, storklike-slipped his wristwatch over his bony knuckles, briskly shut up the reference books and returned them to the shelves, hauled up a heavy-looking backpack, and without a glance in my direction exited the room. The soles of his size-twelve sneakers squeaked against the polished floor.

There I remained, left behind. Accumulating notes on the tragically endangered class of creatures Amphibia for my earth science class.

Did it occur to you to exit the library at the rear? Just in case he was waiting at the front.

Did it occur to you it might be a good idea not to meet up with this boy?

Of course it didn’t occur to you he might be older than he appeared.

He might be other than he appeared.

Of course it didn’t occur to you, and why?

Because you were sixteen. An immature sixteen.

A not-pretty girl. A lonely girl.

A desperate girl.

“Hey. Hi.”

He was waiting for me outside the library.

This was such a shock to me, a relief and a wonder-as if nothing so extraordinary had ever happened and could not have been predicted.

I had assumed that he’d left. He’d lost interest in me and he’d left and I would not see him again, as sometimes-how often, I didn’t care to know-male interest in me, stimulated initially, mysteriously melted, evaporated and vanished.

But there he was waiting for me, in no way that might intimidate me: just sitting on the stone bench at the foot of the steps, leafing through a library book he was about to slide into his backpack.

Seeing the look of surprise in my face, the boy said “Hi!” a second time, smiling so deeply that tiny knife cuts of dimples appeared in his lean cheeks.

Shyly, I said hello. My heart was beating in a feathery light way that made it hard for me to breathe.

And shyly we stared at each other. To be singled out was such an unnerving experience for me, I had no idea how to behave.

To feel this sensation of unease and excitement, and so quickly.

Like a basketball tossed at me without warning, or a hockey puck skittering along the playing field in the direction of my feet-I had to react without thinking or risk getting hurt.

Boldly, yet not aggressively, he asked my name. And when I told him he repeated “Lizbeth.”

He told me his name-Desmond Parrish.

Amazingly, he held out his hand for me to shake-as if we were adults.

He’d gotten to his feet, in a chivalrous gesture. He was smiling so hard now, his glittery gold glasses seemed to have become dislodged and he had to push them against the bridge of his nose with the flat of his hand.

“I wondered how long you’d stay in there. I was hoping you wouldn’t stay until the library closed.”

Awkwardly I murmured that I was doing research for a paper in my Earth science class…

“Earth science! Quick, tell me, what’s the age of Earth?”

“I-I don’t remember…”

“Multiple-choice question: the age of Earth is a) fifty million years, b) three hundred sixty thousand years, c) ten thousand years, d) forty billion years, e) four point five billion years. No hurry!”

Trying to remember, and to reason: but he was laughing at me.

Teasing-laughing. In a way to make my face burn with pleasure.

“Well, I know it can’t be ten thousand years. So we can eliminate that.”

“You’re certain? Ten thousand years would be appropriate if Noah and his ark are factored in. You don’t believe in Noah and his ark?”

“N-No…”

“How’d the animals survive the flood, then? Birds, human beings? Fish, you can see how fish would survive, no problem factoring in fish, but mammals? Nonarboreal primates? How’d they manage?”

It was like trying to juggle a half-dozen balls at once, trying to talk to this very funny boy. Seeing that I was becoming flustered, he relented, saying, “If you consider that life of some kind has been around about three point five billion years, then it figures-right?-the answer is e) four point five billion years. That’s a loooong time, before October ninth, nineteen seventy-seven, in Strykersville, New York. A looong time before Lizbeth and Desmond.”

Like a TV standup comic, Desmond Parrish spoke rapidly and precisely and made wild-funny gestures with his hands.

No one had ever made me laugh so hard, so quickly. So breathlessly.

As if it was the most natural thing in the world, Desmond walked with me to the street. He was a head taller than me-at least five feet eleven. He’d swung his heavy backpack onto his shoulders and walked with a slight stoop. Covertly I glanced about to see if anyone was watching us-anyone who knew me: Is that Lizbeth Marsh? Who on earth is that tall boy she’s with?

It seemed natural, too, that Desmond would walk me to my bicycle, leaning against the wrought-iron fence. Theft was so rare in Strykersville in those years, no one bothered with locks.

Desmond stroked the chrome handlebars of my bicycle, which were lightly flecked with rust-the bicycle was an English racer but inexpensive, with only three gears-and said he’d seen me bicycling on the very afternoon he and his family had moved to Strykersville, twelve days before: “At least, I think she was you.”

This was a strange thing to say, I thought. As if Desmond really did know me and we weren’t strangers.

Somehow it happened Desmond and I were walking together on Main Street. I wasn’t riding my bicycle; Desmond was pushing it while I walked beside him. His eyes were almond-shaped and fixed on me in a way both tender and intense, which made me feel weak.

Already the feeling between us was so vivid and clear-As if we’d known each other a long time ago.

People scorn such an idea. People laugh, who know no better.

“Lizbeth, you can call me Des. That’s what my friends call me.”

Desmond paused, staring down at me with his strange wistful smile.

“Of course, I don’t have any friends in Strykersville yet. Just you.”

This was so flattering! I laughed, to suggest that if he was joking, I knew he’d meant to be funny.

“But I don’t think that I will call you Liz-Lizbeth is preferable. Liz is plebian, Lizbeth patrician. You are my patrician friend in plebian western New York State.”

Desmond asked me where I lived and where I went to school; he described himself as “dangling, like a misplaced modifier, between academic accommodations” in a droll way to make me smile, though I had no idea what this meant.

At each street corner I was thinking that Desmond would pause and say goodbye, or I would summon up the courage to interrupt his entertaining speech and explain that I had to bicycle home soon, my parents were expecting me.

On Main Street we were passing store windows. Pedestrians parted for us, glancing at us with no particular interest, as if we were a couple-Lizbeth, Desmond.

Desmond’s arm brushed against mine by accident. The hairs on my arm stirred.

I saw a cluster of small dark moles on his forearm. I felt a sensation like warmth lifting from his skin, communicated to me on the side of my body closest to him.

Though I was sixteen I had not had a boyfriend, exactly. Not yet.

I had not been kissed. Not exactly.

There were boys in my class who’d asked me to parties, even back in middle school. But no one had ever picked me up at home; we’d just met at the party. Often the boy would drift off during the course of the evening, with his friends. Or I’d have drifted off, eager to summon my father to come pick me up.

Mostly I’d been with other girls, in gatherings with boys. We weren’t what you would call a popular crowd and no one had ever singled me out. No one had ever looked at me as Desmond Parrish was looking at me.

Walking along Main Street! Saturday afternoon in October! So often I’d seen girls walking with their boyfriends, holding hands; I’d felt a pang of envy, that such a thing would never happen to me.

Desmond and I weren’t holding hands, of course. Not yet.

Beside us in store windows our reflections moved ghostly and fleeting-tall lanky Desmond Parrish with his close-trimmed hair and schoolboy glasses, and me, Lizbeth, beside him, closer to the store windows so that it looked as if Desmond were looming above me, protecting me.

At the corner of Main Street and Glenville Avenue, which would have been a natural time for me to take my bicycle from Desmond and bicycle home, Desmond suggested that we stop for a Coke, or ice cream-“If this was Italy, where there are gelato shops every five hundred feet, we’d have our pick of terrific flavors.”

I’d never been to Italy, and would have thought that gelato meant Jell-O.

In the vicinity there was only the Sweet Shoppe, a quaint little ice cream-candy store of another era, which Desmond declared had “character”-“atmosphere.” We sat at a booth beside a wall of dingy mirrors and each of us had a double scoop of pistachio butter crunch. This was Desmond’s choice, which he ordered for me as well and paid for, in a generous, careless gesture, with a ten-dollar bill tossed onto the table for the waitress: “Keep the change for yourself, please.”

The waitress, not much older than I was, could not have been more surprised if Desmond had tossed a fifty-dollar bill at her.

In the Sweet Shoppe, tips were rare.

For the next forty minutes, Desmond did most of the talking. Sitting across from me in the booth, he leaned forward, elbows on the sticky tabletop, his shoulders stooped and the tendons in his neck taut.

By this time I was beginning to feel dazed, hypnotized-I had not ever been made to feel so significant in anyone’s eyes.

Kindly and intense in his questioning, Desmond asked me more about myself. Had my family always lived in Strykersville, what did my father do, what were my favorite subjects at school, even my favorite teachers-though the names of Strykersville High School teachers could have meant nothing to him. He asked me my birth date and seemed surprised when I told him (April 11, 1961)-“You look younger”-and possibly for a moment this was disappointing to him; but then he smiled his quick dimpled smile, as if he were forgiving me, or finding a way he could accept my age-“You could be, like, thirteen.”

This was so. But I had never thought of it as an advantage of any kind.

“Life becomes complicated when living things mature-the apparatus of a physical body is, essentially, to bring forth another physical body. If that isn’t your wish, maturity is a pain in the ass.”

I laughed, to show Desmond that I knew what he meant. Or I thought I knew what he meant.

Though I wasn’t sure why it was funny.

I said, “My mother tells me not to worry-I will grow when I’m ready.”

“When your genes are ready, Lizbeth. But they may have their own inscrutable plans.”

Desmond told me that his family was descended from “lapsed WASP” ancestors in Marblehead, Massachusetts; he’d been born in Newton, and went to grade school there; then he’d been sent to a “posh, Englishy-faggoty” private school in Brigham, Mass.-“D’you know where Brigham is? In the heart of the Miskatonic Valley.” Yet it also seemed that his family had spent time living abroad-Scotland, Germany, Austria. His father, Dr. Parrish-Desmond pronounced “Dok-tor Parrish” in a way to signal how pompous he thought such titles were-had helped to establish European research institutes connected to a “global” pharmaceutical company, “the name of which I am forbidden to reveal, for reasons also not to be revealed.”

Desmond was joking, but serious, too. Pressing his forefinger against his pursed lips as if to swear me to secrecy.

When we parted finally in the late afternoon, Desmond said he hoped we would see each other again soon.

Yes, I said. I would like that.

“We could walk, hike, bicycle-read together-I mean, read aloud to each other. We don’t always have to talk.”

Desmond asked me my telephone number and my address but didn’t write the information down. “It’s indelibly imprinted in my memory, Lizbeth. You’ll see!”

I have a boyfriend!

My first boyfriend!

A passport, this seemed to me. To a new wonderful country only glimpsed in the distance until now.

He hated the telephone, he said: “Talking blind makes me feel like I’ve lost one of my senses.”

He preferred just showing up: after school, at my house.

For instance, on the day after we’d first met, he bicycled to my house without calling first, and we spent two hours talking together on the rear redwood deck of my house. So casually he’d turned up, on a new-model Italian bicycle with numerous speeds, his head encased in a shiny yellow helmet-“Hey, Lizbeth, remember me?”

My mother was stunned. My mother, to whom I hadn’t said a word about meeting Desmond the previous day, for fear that I would never see him again-clearly astonished that her plain-faced and immature younger daughter had a visitor like Desmond Parrish.

When my mother came outside onto the deck to meet him, Desmond stood hastily, lanky and tall and “adult.” “Mrs. Marsh, it’s wonderful to meet you! Lizbeth has told me such intriguing things about you.”

“Intriguing? Me? She has? Whatever-?”

It was comical-cruelly, I thought it was comical-that my mother hadn’t a clue that Desmond was joking; that even the gallant way in which he shook my mother’s hand, another surprise to her, was one of his sly jokes.

But Desmond was sweet, funny, affectionate-as if the adult woman he was teasing on this occasion, and would tease on other occasions, was a relative of his: his own mother, perhaps.

“D’you believe in serendipity, Mrs. Marsh? A theory of the universe in which nothing is an accident-nothing accidental. Our meeting here, and the three of us here together, two twenty-four P.M., October eleventh, nineteen seventy-seven, was destined to occur from the start of time, the Big Bang that set all things in motion. Which is why it feels so right.”

Charmed by her daughter’s new friend, like no other friend Lizbeth had ever brought home, female or male, my mother pulled up a deck chair and sat with us for a while; clearly she was impressed with Desmond Parrish when he mentioned to her, as if by chance, that his father was a “research scientist”-with an “M.D. from Johns Hopkins”-the new district supervisor of a “global” pharmaceutical company with a branch in Rochester, a forty-minute commute from Strykersville.

Immediately my mother said, “In Rochester? Nord Pharmaceuticals?”

Desmond seemed reluctant to admit a connection with the gigantic corporation that had been in the news intermittently in the past several years, as he seemed reluctant to tell my mother specifically where his family had moved in Strykersville, in fact not in the city but in a suburban-rural gated community north of the city called Sylvan Hills.

“It must be beautiful there. I’ve seen some of the houses from the outside…”

“That might be the best perspective, Mrs. Marsh. From the outside.”

My mother was a lovely woman of whom it would never be said that she was in any way socially ambitious, or even socially conscious; yet I saw how her eyes moved over Desmond Parrish, noting his neatly brushed hair, his clean-shaven lean jaws and polished eyeglasses, his fresh-laundered sport shirt with the tiny crocodile on the pocket; noting the handsome wristwatch with the large, elaborate face (Desmond had shown me how the watch not only told time but told the temperature, the date, the tides, the barometric pressure, and could be used as a compass) and his close-clipped, clean nails.

“You should come to dinner soon, Desmond! It would be nice to meet your parents sometime, too.”

“Yes. You are right, Mrs. Marsh. It would be.”

Desmond spoke politely, just slightly stiffly. I sensed his rebuff of my mother’s spontaneous invitation, but my mother didn’t seem to notice.

He’d brought with him, in his backpack, a Polaroid camera with which he took several pictures of me when we were alone again. As he snapped the pictures he was very quiet, squinting at me through the viewfinder. Only once or twice he spoke-“Don’t move! Please. And look at me with your eyes-fully. Straight to the heart.”

I was very self-conscious about having my picture taken. Badly I wanted to lift my hands, to hide my face.

Nearby on the deck lay our golden retriever, Rollo, an older dog with dun-colored hair and drowsy eyes; he’d regarded Desmond with curiosity at first, then dropped off to sleep; now, when Desmond began taking my picture, he stirred, moved his tail cautiously, came forward, and settled his heavy head in Desmond’s lap in an unexpected display of trust. Desmond petted his head and stroked his ears, looking as if he were deeply moved.

“Rollo! ‘Rollo May’ is enshrined in my DNA. This is why fate directed me to Strykersville, Lizbeth. From the Big Bang-onward-to you.”

We hiked in Fort Huron Park. We bicycled along a towpath beside the lake. And there was a boat rental, rowboats and canoes, and impulsively I said, “Let’s rent a rowboat, Des! Please.”

The lake was called Little Huron Lake. Long ago my father had taken Kristine and me out in a rowboat here and the memory was still vivid, thrilling. But I had not been back in years and was surprised to see how relatively few boats there were in the rental.

Desmond spoke slowly, thoughtfully. As if an idea, like a Polaroid print, were taking shape in his mind.

“Not a rowboat, Lizbeth-a canoe. Rowboats are crude. Canoes are so much more… responsive.”

Desmond took my hand as an adult might take a child’s hand and walked with me to the boat rental. It was the first time he’d taken my hand in this way, in a public place-his fingers were strong and firm, closed about mine. With a giddy sensation I thought, This is life! This is how it is lived.

There was a young couple in one of the canoes, the girl at the prow and the man at the stern wielding the paddle. The girl’s red-brown hair shone in the sun. As the canoe rocked in the waves the girl gave a frightened little cry, though you could see that there was little danger of the canoe capsizing.

“I’m afraid of canoes, I think. I’ve never been out in one.”

“Never been in a canoe!”

Desmond laughed, a high-pitched sort of laugh, excited, perhaps a little anxious. Clearly this was an adventure for him, too. Squatting on the small dock, he inspected each of the canoes, peering into it, stroking the sides as a blind man might have touched it, to determine its sturdiness. At least, that’s what I thought he must be doing.

“The Indians made canoes of wood, of course. Beautifully structured, shaped vessels. Some were small, for just two people-like these. Some were long, as long as twenty feet-for war.”

The boat-rental man came by, a stocky bearded man, and said something to Desmond which I didn’t quite hear, which seemed to upset Desmond, who reacted abruptly, and oddly-he stood, returned to me and grabbed my hand and again hauled me forward, this time away from the boat rental.

“Some other time. This is not the right time.”

“What did the man say to you? Is something wrong?”

“He said, ‘Not the right time.’”

Desmond appeared shaken. His face was ashen, grave. His lips were downturned and twitching.

I could not believe that the boat-rental person had actually said to Desmond “Not the right time”-but I knew that if I questioned Desmond, I would not find out anything more.

“If I died, it would be just temporary. Until a new being was born.”

“That’s reincarnation?”

“Yes! Because we are immortal in spirit, though our bodies may crumble to dust.”

Desmond removed his gold-rimmed glasses to gaze at me. His eyes were large, liquidy, myopic. There was a tenderness in his face when he spoke in such a way that made me feel faint with love for him-though I never knew if he was speaking sincerely or ironically.

“I thought you were a skeptic-you’ve said. Isn’t reincarnation unscientific? In our earth science class our teacher said-”

“For God’s sake, Lizbeth! Your science teacher is a secondary public-school teacher in Strykersville, New York! Say no more.”

“But if there’s reincarnation”-still I persisted, for it seemed crucial to know-“where are all the extra souls coming from? The earth’s population is much larger than it ever was in the past, especially thousands of years ago…”

Desmond dismissed my objection with an airy wave of his hand.

“Reincarnation is de facto, whether you have the intellectual apparatus to comprehend it. We are never born entirely new-we inherit our ancestors’ genes. That’s why some of us, when we meet for the first time, it isn’t the first time-we’ve known each other in a past lifetime.”

Could this be true? I wanted to think so.

As Desmond spoke, more and more I was coming to think so.

“We can recognize a soul mate at first sight. Because of course the soul mate has been our closest friend from that other lifetime, even if we can’t clearly remember.”

Desmond had taken out his Polaroid and insisted upon posing me against a backdrop of flaming sumac, in a remote corner of Fort Huron Park, where we’d bicycled on a mild October Saturday.

Each time Desmond and I were together, Desmond took pictures. Some of these he gave to me, as mementos. Most he kept for himself.

“A picture is a memento of a time already past-passing into oblivion. That’s why some people don’t smile when they are photographed.”

“Is that why you don’t smile?”

“Yes. A smiling photograph is a joke when it’s posthumous.”

“Posthumous-how?”

“Like, above an obituary.”

It was so; when I tried to take Desmond’s picture with my little Kodak camera, he refused to smile. After the first attempt, he hid his face behind outstretched fingers. “Basta. Photographers hate to be photographed, that’s a fact.”

Another time he said, mysteriously, “There are crude images of me in the public world, for which I had not given permission. If you take a picture, someone might appropriate it and make a copy-you’re using film. Which is why I prefer the Polaroid, which is unique and one time only.”

When Desmond photographed me, he posed me, gripping my shoulders firmly, positioning me in place. Often he turned my head slightly, his long fingers framing my face with a grip that would have been strong if I’d resisted but was gentle since I complied.

More than once, Desmond asked me about my family-my “ancestors.”

I told him what I knew. I’d wondered if he was teasing me.

Several times I told him that I had just a single, older sibling-my sister, Kristine. Either Desmond seemed to forget this negligible fact or he had a preoccupation with the subject of siblings.

He was curious about Kristine-he wanted to see her (at a distance), “not necessarily meet her.” And just once did Desmond meet Kristine, by accident when he and I were walking our bicycles across a pedestrian bridge in the direction of Fort Huron Park and Kristine with two of her friends was approaching us.

Kristine was twenty years old at this time, a student at Wells College, home for the weekend.

“Kristine! I’ve heard such great things about you,” Desmond said, shaking my sister’s hand vigorously. “Lizbeth talks about you all the time.”

This remark, which had so charmed my mother, fell flat with Kristine, who stared at Desmond with something like alarm.

“Yes? I’ll bet.”

Kristine spoke coolly. Her smile was forced and fleeting. She made no attempt to introduce Desmond to her friends (girls she’d known in high school), who also stared at Desmond, who loomed tall and lanky and ill at ease, smiling awkwardly at them.

I was furious with Kristine and her friends: their rudeness.

They’re jealous of me. That I have a boyfriend.

They don’t want me to be happy, they want me to be like them.

Afterward, Desmond asked about Kristine: was she always so hostile?

“Yes. I mean, no! Not always.”

“She didn’t seem to like me.”

Desmond spoke wistfully. Yet I sensed incredulity, even anger beneath.

I said, “We get along better now that she’s away at college, but it used to be hard-hard on me-to be her younger sister. Kristine is so critical, bossy-sarcastic… Always thinks she knows what’s best for me…”

Maybe this wasn’t altogether true. My older sister was genuinely fond of me, too, and would be hurt to hear these words. My face smarted with embarrassment, that Kristine hadn’t been nearly so impressed with Desmond as I’d hoped, or as Desmond might have hoped.

She had to be jealous! That was it.

Desmond said, “She looked at me as if-as if she knew me. But she doesn’t know me. Not at all.”

Later he said, “I’m an only child. Which is why I’m fated to be an outsider, a loner. Which is why my favorite writer has always been Henry David Thoreau-‘The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad.’”

At home, Kristine said, “This Desmond Parrish. Mom was telling me about him, and he isn’t at all what Mom said, or you’ve been saying-it’s all an act. Can’t you see it?”

“An act-how? What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. There’s something not right about him.”

“Not right-how? He’s a wonderful person…”

“Where did you meet him, exactly?”

I’d told Kristine where I had met Desmond. I’d told her what he’d explained to me-he’d been offered a scholarship at Amherst, his father’s college, but had deferred it for a year, at his request.

Kristine continued to question me about Desmond in a way I found offensive and condescending. I told her that she didn’t know anything at all about Desmond, what he was like when we were alone together, how smart and funny he was, how thoughtful. “I think you’re just jealous.”

“Jealous! I am not.”

“I think you are. You don’t like to see me happy.”

Kristine said, incensed, “Why would I be jealous of him? He’s weird. His eyes are strange. I bet he’s older than he says he is-at least twenty-three.”

“Desmond is nineteen!”

“And you know this how?”

“He told me. He took a year off between high school and college-he deferred going to Amherst this year.”

“This year? Or some other year?”

“I think you’re being ridiculous, and you’re being mean.”

“Also I think-I wouldn’t be surprised-he’s gay.”

This was a shock to me. Yet in a way not such a shock.

But I didn’t want Kristine to know. I nearly shoved her away, furious.

“You know, Kristine-I hate you.”

Later, to my chagrin, I overheard Kristine talking with my mother in a serious tone about this “weird boy” who was “hanging out” with Lizbeth, who seemed “strange” to her.

Mom objected: “I think he’s very nice. He’s very well-mannered. You want your sister to have friends, don’t you?”

“She has friends. She has great girlfriends.”

“You want her to have a boyfriend, don’t you? She’s sixteen.”

“Just that he’d be attracted to Lizbeth, who looks so young, and”-here Kristine hesitated; I knew she wanted to say that I wasn’t pretty, wasn’t attractive, only a weird boy would be interested in me-“isn’t what you’d call ‘experienced’-that seems suspicious to me.”

“Kristine, you’re being unfair. I’ve spoken with Desmond several times and he’s always been extremely congenial. He’s nothing like the high school boys around here-thank God. I’d like to have him to dinner sometime, with his parents. I think that would be very nice for Lizbeth.”

“Not when I’m here, please! Count me out.”

“I’d almost think, Krissie, that you’re a little jealous of your younger sister. Among your friends there isn’t anyone I’ve met who is anything like Desmond Parrish…”

“He’s weird. I think he’s gay. It’s okay to be weird and to be gay but not to hang around with my sister, please!”

“All right, Krissie. You’ve made your point.”

“I’m just concerned about her, is all.”

“Well, I think that Lizbeth can take care of herself. And I’m watching, too.”

Kristine laughed derisively, as if she didn’t think much of my mother’s powers of observation.

“Dreams! The great mystery within.”

On the redwood deck a few feet from us Rollo lay sprawled in the sun, asleep. His paws twitched and his gray muzzle moved as if, in his deep dog-sleep, he were trying to talk.

“Animals dream. You can observe them. In his dream Rollo thinks he’s running, maybe hunting. Retrievers are work dogs, hunting dogs. If not put to the use to which they’ve been bred, they feel sad, incomplete. They feel as if part of their soul has been taken from them.”

Desmond spoke with such certainty! I had never thought of Rollo in such a way.

He said, “Dreams are repositories of the day’s memories. Or dreams are wish fulfillment, as Freud said. In which case there is a double meaning-a dream is the fulfillment of a wish, but the wish can be just a wish to remain asleep. So the dream lulls us into thinking we’re already awake.”

“Then what’s the purpose of nightmares?”

“Must be, obviously-to punish.”

To punish! I’d never thought of such a thing.

“Tell me about your dreams, Lizbeth. You haven’t yet.”

In this, there was an air of slight reproach. Often now Desmond spoke to me as if chiding me; as if there were such familiarity between us he had no need to explain his mood.

I wondered if the meeting with Kristine was to blame. He knew that my sister wasn’t on his side.

I had no idea what to say. Answering Desmond’s questions was like answering questions in school: some teachers, though pretending otherwise, knew exactly what they wanted you to say; if you veered off in another direction, they disapproved.

“Well… I don’t know. I can’t make much sense of my dreams, mostly. For a while, when I was little, I thought they were real-I’d remember them as if they were real. I have a recurring dream of trying to run-stumbling, falling down. I’m trying desperately to get somewhere, and can’t.”

“And who is in your dreams?”

“Who? Oh-it could be anyone, or no one. Strangers.”

We were sitting close together on a wicker sofa-swing on our redwood deck. Desmond’s closeness was exciting to me in contemplation, when I was alone; when we were together, always there was something awkward about us. Desmond never slipped his arm around my shoulder or took my hand, except if he was helping me on a steep hiking trail; he hadn’t yet brought his face close to mine, though he “kissed” me goodbye, brushing his (cool, dry) lips against my cheek or my forehead as an adult might, with a child.

I didn’t want to think that what Kristine had said might be the explanation-Desmond wasn’t attracted to me in that way.

But then, why was he attracted to me at all?

Interrogating me now about my dreams as if this were a crucial subject. Why?

I told him that there was nothing special about my dreams that I could remember. “They’re different every night. Sometimes just flashes and scraps of things, like surfing TV. Except if I have a nightmare…”

“What kind of nightmare?”

“Well… I don’t know. It’s always confusing and scary.”

Desmond was staring at me so intently, I was beginning to feel uneasy.

“What sort of dreams have you been having recently? Has there been anything specific about them?”

How to answer this? I wasn’t sure. It was almost impossible to remember a dream, which evaporated so soon when you awoke.

“Well, I think that a few times I might have dreamed about-you…”

I wasn’t sure if this was true. But it seemed to be the answer Desmond was hoping for.

“Really! Me! What was I doing?”

“I-I don’t remember…”

The figure had been blurred. No face that I could see. But the hand had been uplifted, as if in greeting, or in warning. Stay away. Don’t come near.

“When did you have this dream? Before you met me, or after?”

Desmond was gripping my arm at the wrist, as if not realizing how he squeezed me.

So it was not true that Desmond Parrish rarely touched me: at such times, he did.

Except this did not seem like touch but like… something else.

I wished that my mother would come outside to bring us something to drink, as she sometimes did. But maybe Mom wasn’t in the kitchen but in another part of the house.

Because Desmond dropped by without calling first, there was no way to know when he might show up. There was no way to arrange that someone else might be in the house, if I had wanted someone else to be in the house.

In our friendship, as I wanted to think of it, Desmond was always the one who made decisions: when we would meet, where we would go, what we would do. And if Desmond was busy elsewhere, if from time to time he had “things” to do in his own, private life, he just wouldn’t show up-I didn’t have a phone number to call.

He’d taken out the Polaroid camera, which I’d come to dislike.

“Did you have that dream before you met me? That would be wild!”

“I-I’m not sure. I think it was just the other night…”

“Talk to me, Lizbeth. Tell me about your dreams. Like I’m your analyst, you’re my analysand. That would be cool!”

As I tried seriously to recall a dream, as a submerged dream of the night before slowly materialized in my memory, like a cloudy Polaroid print taking a precise shape, Desmond took pictures of me, from unnervingly close by.

“… there was a lake, a black lake… there were strange tangled-looking trees growing right out into the water, like a solid wall… we were in a canoe… I think it might have been you, paddling… but I’m not sure if it was me with you, exactly.”

“Not you? What do you mean? Who was it then?”

“I-I don’t know.”

“Silly! How can you have a dream in which you are not you? Who else would it be, paddling in a canoe at Lake Miskatonic, except me and you? You’re my guest at our family lodge there-must be.”

Desmond’s voice was distracted as he regarded me through the camera viewfinder.

Click, click! He continued questioning me, and taking pictures, until I hid my face in my hands.

“Sorry! But I got some great shots, I think.”

When I asked Desmond what his dreams were like, he shrugged off the question.

“Don’t know. My dreams have been taken from me, like my driver’s license.”

“How have your dreams been taken from you?”

“You’d have to ask the Herr Doktors.”

I remembered that Desmond’s father was a Doktor. But here was a reference to Doktors.

I wondered if Desmond had taken some sort of medication? I knew that a category of drugs called “psychoactive” could suppress dreams entirely. The mind became blank-an emptiness.

Desmond peered at the Polaroid images as they materialized. Whatever he saw, he decided not to share with me this time and put the pictures away in his backpack without a word.

I said it seemed sad that he didn’t dream any longer.

Desmond shrugged. “Sometimes it’s better not to dream.”

When Desmond left my house that day, he drew his thumb gently across my forehead, at the temple. For a moment I thought he would kiss me there, my eyelids fluttered with expectation-but he didn’t.

“You’re still young enough, your dreams won’t hurt you.”

I thought it might be a mistake. But my eager mother could not be dissuaded.

She invited Desmond to have dinner with us and ask his parents to join us, and with a stiff little smile, as if the first pangs of migraine had struck behind his eyes, Desmond quickly declined: “Thanks, Mrs. Marsh! That’s very generous of you. Except my parents are too busy right now. My father may even be traveling. And me-right now-it’s just not a-not a good time.”

My mother renewed the invitation another time, a few days later, but Desmond replied in the same way. I felt sorry for her, and unease about Desmond. Though when we were alone he had numerous questions to ask me about my family, as about myself, clearly he didn’t want to meet them; nor did he want his parents to meet any of us, even his dear soul mate Lizbeth, whom he claimed to adore.

It was near the end of October that Desmond brought his violin to our house and played for my mother and me.

This magical time! At least, it began that way.

In Desmond’s fingers the beautiful little instrument looked small as a child’s violin. “A little Mozart-for beginners.”

Curious, too, and somehow touching, was the way in which Desmond played the instrument as left-handed, the violin resting against his right shoulder.

Desmond bit his lower lip in concentration as he played, shutting his eyes. He moved the bow across the strings at first tentatively and then with more confidence. The beautiful notes wafted over my mother and me as we sat listening in admiration.

We were not strangers to amateur violin-playing-there were recitals in Strykersville in which both Kristine and I had participated as piano students.

Possibly some of Desmond’s notes were scratchy. Possibly the strings were not all fine-tuned. Desmond himself seemed piqued, and played passages a second time.

My mother said, “Desmond, that’s wonderful! How long have you had lessons?”

“Eleven years, but not continuously. My last teacher said that I’m gifted-for an amateur.”

“Are you taking lessons now?”

“No. Not here.” Desmond’s lips twitched in a faint smile, as if this question were too naive to take seriously but he would take it seriously. “I’m living in Strykersville now, not in Rochester. Or in Munich, or Trieste.”

Meaning that there could be no violin instructor of merit in Strykersville.

My mother lingered for a while, listening to Desmond play. It was clear that she enjoyed Desmond’s company more than the company of many of her friends. I felt a thrill of vindication, that my sister was mistaken about Desmond. I thought, Mom is on our side.

When my mother left us, Desmond played an extraordinarily beautiful piece of music. “It’s a transcription for violin. The ‘love-death’ theme from Tristan und Isolde.”

Though Desmond didn’t play perfectly, the emotional power of the music was unmistakable. I felt that I loved Desmond Parrish deeply-this would be the purest love of my life.

Desmond lowered the bow, smiling at me. His eyes behind the gold-rimmed lenses were earnest, eager.

“Now you try, Lizbeth. I can guide you.”

“Try? To play-what?”

“Just notes. Just do what I instruct you.”

“But-”

“You’ve had violin lessons. The technique will come back to you.”

But I hadn’t had violin lessons. I’d mentioned to Desmond that I had had piano lessons from the age of six to twelve, but I hadn’t been very talented and no one had objected when I quit.

I protested, I couldn’t begin to play a violin! The instrument was totally different from a piano.

“You’ve had music lessons, that’s the main thing. The notes, the relationships between them-that’s the principle of music. C’mon, Lizbeth-try!”

Desmond closed his hand around mine, gripping the bow. As he positioned the fragile instrument on my left shoulder.

“You are right-handed-yes? It’s a little strange for me, this reversal.”

Awkwardly Desmond caused the bow to move over the strings, gripping my fingers. The sounds were scratchy, shrill.

“Desmond, thanks. But-”

“I could teach you, Lizbeth. All that I know, I could impart to you.”

“But-that isn’t very realistic…”

Sternly Desmond said, “Look. Playing a musical instrument requires patience, practice, and faith. It doesn’t require great talent. So don’t use that as an excuse-you aren’t talented. Of course you aren’t talented-that’s beside the point.” He spoke as if explaining something self-evident that only obstinacy prevented me from accepting.

“We could play together. Each with a violin. We could have a recital-people would applaud! But it requires patience.”

The scraping noises of the violin, and Desmond’s abrasive voice, caused Rollo to glance up at us from a few feet away, worriedly.

Desmond was wholly focused upon “instructing” me. This was a side of him I hadn’t seen before-there was nothing tender about him now, only an air of determination. A smell of perspiration lifted from his underarms; there was an oily ooze on his forehead. He breathed quickly, audibly. Our nearness wasn’t a comfort but intimidating. It was beginning to be upsetting that I couldn’t seem to explain to this adamant young man that I really didn’t want to take violin instructions from him, or from anyone.

When I tried to squirm away, he squeezed my hand, hard-he was looming over me, and his smile didn’t seem so friendly now.

“You’re not even trying, for God’s sake. Why do you just give up?”

Hearing Desmond’s voice, my mother appeared in the doorway.

Quickly then Desmond stammered an apology, took back the gleaming little violin from me, and left.

Mom and I stared after him, shaken.

“That voice I heard, Lizbeth-I’d swear it wasn’t Desmond.”

Following this, something seemed to have altered between Desmond and me.

He didn’t call. He began to appear in places I would not expect. He’d never made any effort to see me before school, only after school, once or twice a week at the most, but now I began to see him watching me from across the street when I entered school at about 8 A.M. If I waved shyly to him, he didn’t wave back but turned away as if he hadn’t seen me.

“Is that your boyfriend over there? What’s he doing there?” my girlfriends would ask.

“We had a disagreement. He wants to make up. I think.”

I tried to speak casually. I hoped the tremor in my voice wasn’t detectable.

This was the sort of thing a girl would say, wasn’t it? A girl in my circumstances, with a boyfriend?

I realized that I had no idea what it meant to have a boyfriend.

Still more, had a disagreement.

And after school, Desmond began to appear closer to the building. He didn’t seem to mind, as he’d initially minded, mingling with high school students as they moved past him in an erratic stream-Desmond a fixed point, like a rock. Waiting for me, then staring at me, not smiling, with a curt little wave of his hand as I approached-as if I might not have recognized him otherwise.

I’d gotten into the habit of hurrying from school, on those days I didn’t have a meeting or field hockey. It seemed urgent to get outside soon after the final bell. I didn’t always want to be explaining Desmond to my friends. I didn’t want always to be telling them that I had to hurry, my boyfriend wanted to see me alone.

Where Desmond hadn’t shown any interest in watching me play field hockey, now he might turn up at a game, or even at practice, not sitting in the bleachers with our (usually few) spectators; he preferred to remain aloof, standing at the edge of the playing field, where he could stroll off unobserved at any time-except of course Desmond was observed, especially by me.

“When are you going to introduce Desmond to us, Lizbeth?”

“Is he kind of… the jealous type?”

“He looks like a preppy! He looks rich.”

“He looks a little older, like… a college guy, at least?”

It was thrilling to me that my friends and teammates knew that the tall lanky boy who kept his distance was my boyfriend-but not so thrilling that they must have been talking behind my back, speculating and even worrying about me.

There’s some secret about him, Lizbeth won’t tell.

Maybe Lizbeth doesn’t know!

You think he’s abusing her? You know-it could be mental, too.

Lizbeth is kind of changed lately.

Does anybody know him? His family?

They’re new to Strykersville, Lizbeth said.

She’s crazy about him, that’s obvious.

Or just kind of crazy.

You think he feels the same about her?

“I’m thinking maybe I will defer again-and wait for you. I have plenty of independent research I can do before going to college. And if you couldn’t get into Amherst, or couldn’t afford it, my dad could help out. What d’you think?”

For the first time, I lied to Desmond.

Then, for the second time, I lied to Desmond.

He hadn’t been waiting for me at school but he’d come over to our house at about 6 P.M., rapped on the back door, which led out onto the redwood deck, as he usually did, and when I came to the door I told him that I couldn’t see him right then: “My mom needs me for something. I have to help her with something.”

“Can’t it wait? Or can’t I wait? How long will this ‘something’ require?”

I was so anxious, I hadn’t even invited Desmond inside. Nor did I want to go outside onto the deck, which would make it more difficult for me to ease away from Desmond and back into the house.

A thin cold rain was falling. A smell of wet rotting leaves.

Desmond had bicycled over. He was wearing a shiny yellow rain slicker and a conical rain hat, which made him look both comical and threatening, like an alien life form in a sci-fi horror movie.

“I said I can’t, Desmond. This isn’t a good time… Daddy will be home soon, we’re having dinner early tonight. There’s some family crisis kind of thing going on I can’t tell you about-my elderly grandmother, in a nursing home…”

This was enough to discourage Desmond, who had no more questions for me but backed off with a hurt smirk of a smile.

“Goodnight then, Lizbeth! Have a happy ‘family crisis.’”

This sarcastic remark lingered in my memory like a taste of something rotten in my mouth.

I thought, He hates me now. I have lost him now.

I thought, Thank God! He will find someone else.

It happened then; Desmond Parrish drifted to the edge of my life.

He ceased coming to the house. He ceased waiting for me after school. His telephone calls, which had been infrequent, now ceased.

I felt his fury, at a distance.

He’d been insulted by my resistance to him. So subtle, another boy would scarcely have noticed. But of course Desmond Parrish wasn’t another boy.

I regretted turning him away. I thought it might be the worst mistake of my life. When I received my amphibian paper back, in earth science, seeing a red A+ prominent on the first page, my first wish was to tell Desmond, who’d helped me with the paper.

So long ago, that seemed now! But it had been less than a month.

Desmond had read a draft of the paper for me and made just a few suggestions. He’d encouraged me to explore the theme of amphibian in a way not exclusively literal. “‘Ontology recapitulates philology.’ If you don’t know what that means, I can explain.”

Now all that was changed.

Now I couldn’t predict when I might see Desmond. He had removed himself from my life, decisively-but he was still there, observing.

In the corner of my eye I would see him. And in my uneasy dreams I would see him.

Walking with friends. Driving with my mother in her car.

One afternoon at the mall, with Kristine.

And another time with Kristine, driving to a drugstore a half-mile from our house, in a shopping center, and there I saw, about thirty feet away, Desmond Parrish observing us: in his shiny yellow cyclist’s helmet and a nylon parka and arms folded tight across his chest, and when I stopped to stare, the figure turned quickly away and vanished from my sight.

Seeing the look on my face, Kristine said, “Are you all right, Lizzie? You look kind of sick.”

I was so stricken by the sight of Desmond, I had to sit down for a few minutes.

Kristine asked, concerned, if I wanted to go home; but I said no, I did not want to go home. I did not!

“You’ve seemed kind of quiet lately.”

I told her I was all right. But I had things to think about that couldn’t be shared.

“About Des? Something about Des?”

Kristine knew that Desmond wasn’t dropping by the house any longer. Nor did I speak of Desmond to her now, or to my mother.

“What’s happened to him? Did you two break up?”

In Kristine’s voice there was the equivalent of a smirk.

Break up. Your weird boyfriend.

My sister’s condescending attitude made me want to slap her. For what did Kristine know?

It was so, Desmond frightened me now. Since he’d squeezed my hand so hard, gripping the violin bow, and since I’d sensed in him a willfulness that had no tenderness for me but only a wish to subjugate, I did not want to be in his presence: I began to tremble thinking of him.

Yet, perversely, I cherished the memory of my boyfriend. The memory of Desmond Parrish was more thrilling to me than Desmond himself had been in recent weeks.

“You didn’t… make any mistakes with him, did you? Lizbeth?”

Kristine spoke hesitantly, embarrassed. We were not sisters who confided in each other about intimate things, and we were not about to start now.

Gritting my teeth, I told her no.

“He didn’t coerce you into-or force you into-anything you didn’t want to do, did he?”

Muttering no, I walked away from Kristine.

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to shove her from me or, ridiculously, push into her arms so she could comfort me as she’d done when I’d been a little girl.

“Maybe you thought you loved-love-him. But you didn’t-you don’t…”

When we left the drugstore to cross the parking lot to my mother’s station wagon, which Kristine was driving, in the corner of my eye I saw a tall lean figure wearing a yellow helmet, in the rear exit of another store. It was the very figure I dreaded seeing, and dreaded not seeing.

I collapsed into the station wagon, my knees weak. I didn’t turn to stare at the figure on the pavement; I didn’t say a word to Kristine, who reached out wordlessly to squeeze my hand.

Wistfully my mother said, “Lizbeth, what has happened to Desmond? Has he disappeared? He seemed so-devoted…”

I knew that Mom was thinking, So devoted to both of us.

YOU CAN’T JUST SHUT ME OUT OF YOUR LIFE LIZBETH

YOU KNOW THAT WE ARE SOUL MATES FROM THAT OTHER LIFETIME

This message was left for me, in felt-tip black ink on a scroll of gilt paper, inside a plain white envelope thrust into my high school locker.

I opened the gilt paper and read these words, stunned. I could not believe that Desmond had actually come into the school building, where he didn’t belong; that he’d risked being detected in order to observe me, at least once, who knows how many times, at my locker.

Then, to slip the envelope into my locker, he must have come after school, when the corridor was deserted.

My hand trembled, holding the gilt scroll that looked like some kind of festive announcement.

Many times I would reread it. Many times in the secrecy of my room.

The message held a threat, I thought-or hinted at a threat.

I must tell my parents, I thought.

But they might try to contact Desmond’s parents or, worse yet, the Strykersville police… I did not want this.

Yet it wasn’t clear how Desmond expected me to contact him. He had never given me his telephone number or his address. It was as if we were gazing at each other across a deep ravine and had no way now of communicating except in broad, crude gestures, like individuals who did not share a language.

“Please! Just leave me alone.”

He did call. I think it had to be him.

Late at night, and just a single ring, or two-if someone picked up the phone, silence.

A taunting sort of silence into which words flutter and fall: “Hello? Hello? Who is this…”

He bicycled past our house, I think.

I think it was Desmond Parrish. I couldn’t be sure.

A car pulled into our driveway, headlights blinding against our windows. There was a rude blast of music. Then the car pulled away again.

Then Rollo disappeared.

One night he failed to appear at the back door when we called him, where usually Rollo was pawing the door to be allowed back inside.

(Our acre-sized back lawn was fenced in, so that Rollo could spend as much time outdoors as he wanted. Usually he just slept on the deck.)

We scoured the neighborhood, calling “Rollo! Rollo!”

We rang doorbells. We photocopied fliers to staple to trees, fences. We checked local animal shelters. Kristine came home from Wells to help us search. We were distraught, heartbroken.

I thought, Desmond would not do this. He would not be so cruel, he liked Rollo.

I thought, Maybe he is keeping Rollo. Until I see him again.

Now Desmond was the stalker-this was Kristine’s term.

Suddenly it happened, he was always there. And others saw him, too.

Where previously, before Desmond, I’d often been alone, and comforted myself with self-pity, that I was alone, now I could not ever be alone; I could not ever assume that I was alone. For I knew that Desmond Parrish was thinking about me obsessively, even when he wasn’t actually watching me.

… Can’t just shut me out. Soul mates from that other.. .

Hockey season was ending. This was a relief. For Desmond had begun showing up at practice, which was Thursdays after school. A lone lanky figure now behind the chain-link fence at the very rear of the playing field, arms uplifted and fingers caught in the links so that a quick glance made you think that whoever this was, he’d been crucified against the fence.

My teammates nudged me in the ribs, whispered to me.

“Hey, Lizbeth, is that your boyfriend?”

Or, “Looks like Lizbeth’s boyfriend is stalking her.”

Our coach called me into her office and spoke with me frankly. She said that my boyfriend was causing distraction and disruption. “You aren’t playing very well, which is why I haven’t sent you in much lately. And your distraction is bringing your teammates down.”

Weakly I said, “He isn’t my boyfriend. We broke up, I guess… I don’t know why he’s doing this.”

“How close were you two? Were you… intimate?”

The question was like a slap in the face. To answer no seemed pathetic. To answer yes would have been more pathetic.

I told Ms. DeLuca no. Not intimate.

“You’re sure?” Ms. DeLuca regarded me suspiciously.

Yes, I was sure. But I spoke slowly, uncertainly. For just to speak of Desmond with a stranger was a betrayal of our true intimacy, which was like nothing else in my life until that time.

“Lizbeth? Are you listening?”

“Y-yes…”

“There has certainly been a change in you. Your eyes look haunted. Did this boy abuse you in any way? Did he take advantage of you?”

I shook my head wordlessly. How I hated this woman who wanted only to protect me!

“Well, do your parents know about him? They’ve met him-have they?”

I murmured yes ambiguously. For after all, Mom knew Desmond well-or would have claimed that she did.

I’d never told my father. I was terrified of what my father might say and do, for I believed that in his alarm at what was happening, my father would blame me.

Finally I left Ms. DeLuca’s office. I wasn’t sure if our awkward conversation had ended; I just left.

In a plain manila envelope addressed to “LIZBETH” at my street address, he sent me photographs of myself taken with a zoom lens. These were not Polaroids but small matte photos: there I was, oblivious of the camera eye, climbing out of my mother’s car, walking with friends on the sidewalk near school, playing field hockey. The most disturbing photo was of me inside our house, after dark in our lighted kitchen, talking with a blurred figure who must have been my mother.

On the back of this photo was written in block letters:

SO NEAR ANY TIME ALWAYS

I did not show anyone. I was terrified how my family would react.

You did this! You invited this person into our lives.

How could you have been so careless? So blind, ignorant?

Terrible to see myself, a figure in another’s imagination, of no more substance than a paper doll.

A figure at the mercy of the invisible/invincible photographer.

I stood at the window, staring out into the darkness of our backyard. At the farther end of our property were trees, a thick stand of trees, impenetrable in darkness as a wall.

I thought that Desmond must hide inside these trees, with his remarkable zoom lens.

He was a hunter. I was in his crosshairs.

I wanted to scream out the back door I hate you! I wish you were dead! Give Rollo back to us! Leave us alone.

Desperately I wanted to wake up and it would be six-seven?-weeks ago.

Before the library. Before I’d bicycled into town on a Saturday afternoon to take notes on the evolution of amphibians in a way to make of myself a good dutiful student.

And I would wake up to the relief that no one was following me-no one loved me.

Then one day when I was leaving school late, after a meeting, at dusk, there stood Desmond Parrish waiting for me.

“Hey, Lizbeth! Remember me?”

Desmond was smiling at me, in reproach. The muscles of his face were clenched, he was so angry with me.

“Haven’t forgotten me, have you? Your friend Des.”

I stammered that I didn’t want to see him. I would have turned to run back into the school building, but I didn’t want to insult him.

I didn’t want to anger him further.

I could not move: my legs were weak, paralyzed.

“Know what I think, Lizbeth? I think you’ve been avoiding me. We’ve had a misunderstanding. I want to honor that-I mean, your wish to avoid me. I am all for the rights of women-a female is not chattel. But since your behavior is based upon a misunderstanding, the logical solution would be to clear it up. We need to talk. And I have a car, I can drive you home.”

“You have a car? You have a license to drive?”

“I have a car. My father’s car. I’d only need a license to drive if I intended to have an accident or to violate a traffic law, which I don’t intend.”

“I-I can’t, Desmond. I’m sorry.”

Still, I couldn’t move. My knees had lost all strength.

Desmond loomed above me, smiling so hard that the lower part of his face appeared about to crack.

His jaws were unshaven. His smart gold-rimmed glasses were askew on his nose. His hair hadn’t been cut in some time and had begun to straggle over his collar.

“Just come with me, Lizbeth. We’ll take a little drive-to the lake-the lake right here-remember, the canoes? You wanted to go out in a canoe, but then you were afraid? You were silly-you were afraid. But there’s nothing to be afraid of. We can go there-we can try again. Then I’ll drive you home. I promise. We need to talk.”

Desperately I said that it was too late in the season, the boat rental wouldn’t be open in November. And it was too late in the day, it was dark…

Foolishly, I was protesting. As if renting a canoe was the point when clearly Desmond wanted to take me with him-wherever he had in mind.

There was in fact a vehicle parked nearby; headlights on, motor running, and driver’s door flung open as if the driver had just leaped out.

Desmond dared to come forward and take hold of my arm.

Desmond dared to taunt me, in a mock tender voice.

“I’ve heard your dog is lost. That’s a tragedy-you love that dog. All of you love that dog. Might be I could help you look for him. Was it Rollo? Named for Rollo May? Cool!”

I had no idea what Desmond was saying, just that he had Rollo. He knew where Rollo was.

Yet he was pulling me toward the car. Instinctively I resisted.

“No. I don’t want to go with you!”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Lizbeth. Of course you want to come with me if I can lead you to Rollo. And we can go to the lake-Little Huron Lake. In less than an hour this will all be cleared up and we will be friends again.”

I tried to disengage my arm from Desmond. His fingers gripped me tight.

My voice was pleading. “What do you want with me? Why are you doing this?”

“What do I want with you! What do you want with me! We are destined for each other, as I knew at first sight, Lizbeth-and so did you.”

Panicked, I thought, This is not real. This is not happening.

I thought, The boyfriend!

Even with the lure of finding Rollo, I knew that I must not get into that car with Desmond Parrish.

Desmond cursed me, as I’d never heard him curse before. I was reminded of my mother remarking that the voice she’d heard on our deck hadn’t been Desmond’s voice but the voice of another.

Desmond was grappling with me, pinning my arms against my sides, half carrying me to his car. I could feel his hot breath in my face. I could smell his body-the hot sweaty urgency of a male body. I was too frightened to scream. I could not draw breath to scream.

Then someone saw us, shouted at us, and Desmond quickly released me, ran to his car, and drove away.

“Who was that? What was he trying to do to you?” one of the vocational arts teachers was asking me.

I told him it was all right: I told him it was a misunderstanding.

“Should I call 911?”

“No! No, please. It’s just my boyfriend-but things will be all right now.”

I was upstairs in my room when my mother called up to me, sounding hysterical.

On the local ten o’clock news it was announced that a Strykersville resident, Desmond Parrish, had died in a single-vehicle accident on the thruway. His car, driven at an estimated eighty miles an hour, had crashed into a concrete overpass six miles south of Strykersville.

We stared at film footage of the wreck, partly obscured by the flashing lights of medical vehicles and flares set in the left lane of the interstate highway. A young woman newscaster was saying solemnly that death was believed to have been instantaneous.

We stared at a photograph of Desmond Parrish looking very young, with schoolboy eyeglasses and a knife-sharp part in his hair.

“That can’t be Desmond! I don’t believe this…”

My mother was more upset than I was. My mother was gripping my hands to console me, but my hands were limp and cold and unresponsive.

I was too shocked to comprehend most of the news. The breaking-news bulletin passed so swiftly; within a few seconds it had ended and was supplanted by an advertisement.

My mother embraced me, weeping. I held myself stiff and unyielding.

I was waiting for the phone to ring: for Desmond to call, a final taunting time.

That night I dreamed of Little Huron Lake rippling in darkness.

In the morning we read in the Strykersville paper a more detailed account of how Desmond Parrish had died.

The front-page article contained another photograph of Desmond taken years before, looking very young. Again, Desmond wasn’t smiling.

The photograph ran above the terrible headline:

STRYKERSVILLE RESIDENT, 22, DIES IN THRUWAY CRASH

Witnesses of the “accident” reported to state troopers that the speeding vehicle seemed to have been accelerating when the driver “lost control,” slammed through a guard rail, and struck the concrete abutment head-on. No signs of skidding had been detected on the pavement.

The wrecked automobile, a 1977 Mercedes-Benz, was registered in the name of Gordon Parrish, Desmond’s father.

Desmond Parrish had been driving without a license. At the time of the crash, his parents had not known where he was: he’d been “missing from the house” since the afternoon.

Again it was stated, “Death is believed to have been instantaneous.”

New York State Police would be investigating the crash, which occurred outside the jurisdiction of the Strykersville police department.

Soon after, a woman who identified herself as a detective with the New York State Police came to our house to speak with me and my parents.

The detective informed us that a “cache” of photographs and “journal entries” concerning me had been recovered from the wrecked car.

Police were investigating the possibility that Desmond Parrish had committed suicide. The detective asked me if I had been intimate with Desmond Parrish; how long I had known Desmond Parrish, and in what capacity; when I had seen him last; what his “state of mind” had been when I’d seen him.

Calmly I replied. Tried to reply. I was aware of my parents listening to me, astonished.

Astonished and disapproving. For I had betrayed them, in not sharing with them all that had passed between my boyfriend and me.

Never after this would they trust me wholly. Never after this would my father regard me, as he’d liked to regard me in the past, as his little girl.

For instance, my parents hadn’t known that Desmond had been stalking me-that he’d left a threatening message in my locker at school. They hadn’t known that I’d seen Desmond so recently, on the very day of his death.

They hadn’t known that he’d wanted me to come with him in that car, to drive to Little Huron Lake.

I would give a statement to police: Desmond had confronted me behind our school building at about 5:20 P.M. By 9:20 P.M. he had died.

The vocational arts teacher who’d come up behind us, who’d surprised and frightened Desmond away, would give a statement to police officers also.

There’d been an “altercation” between Desmond Parrish and the sixteen-year-old high school sophomore Lizbeth Marsh. But Ms. Marsh had not wanted the teacher to call 911, and Mr. Parrish had driven away in his father’s Mercedes.

It was believed that prior to the crash he’d “ingested” a quantity of alcohol. He had been driving without a license.

The detective told us that the Parrishes refused to believe that their son may have caused his own death deliberately. At the present time, they were not speaking with police officers and were “not accessible” to the media.

It would be their theory, issued through a lawyer, that their son had had an accident: he’d been drinking, he had not ever drunk to excess before and wasn’t accustomed to alcohol, he’d had “personal issues” that had led to his drinking and so had “lost control” of the car and died.

He had not been suicidal, they insisted.

He had so much to live for, since moving to Strykersville.

He was seeing a therapist, and he’d been “making progress.” He had not ever spoken of suicide, they insisted.

He’d had a “brilliant future,” in fact. A scholarship to Amherst College, to study classics.

“You know, I hope, about Desmond’s background? His criminal record?”

Criminal record?

We were utterly stunned by the detective’s remark.

She told us that Desmond had been incarcerated from the age of fourteen to the age of twenty-one in the Brigham Men’s Facility for Youthful Offenders in Brigham, Massachusetts. He’d pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in the death of his eleven-year-old sister in August 1970.

All that was known of the incident was that Desmond, fourteen at the time, had been canoeing with his sister, Amanda, on Lake Miskatonic, where the Parrishes had a summer lodge, when in a “sudden fit of rage” he’d attacked her with the paddle, beat her about the head and chest until she died, and tried without success to push her body into the lake without capsizing the canoe. No one had witnessed the murder, but the boy had been found in the drifting canoe, with his sister’s bloodied corpse and the bloodied and splintered paddle, in a catatonic state.

Desmond had never explained clearly why he’d killed his sister except she’d made him “mad”; he’d had a quick temper since early childhood and had been variously diagnosed as suffering from attention deficit disorder, childhood schizophrenia, Asperger’s syndrome, even autism. He’d been “unusually close” to his sister and had played violin duets with her. His parents had hired a lawyer to defend him against charges of second-degree homicide. After months of negotiations he’d been allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge of manslaughter and was sentenced to seven years in the youth facility, which contained also a unit for psychiatric subjects, from which offenders were automatically released at the age of twenty-one.

This was a ridiculous statute, the prosecution claimed-anyone who’d committed such a “vicious” murder should not be released into society after just seven years. But Desmond was too young at fourteen to be tried as an adult. He’d been diagnosed as undeniably ill-mentally ill-but in the facility he’d responded well to therapy and was declared, by the time of his twenty-first birthday, to pose no clear and present danger to himself or others.

The family had relocated to Strykersville, within commuting distance of Rochester. It was hoped that the family, as well as Desmond, would make a “new start” here.

The Parrishes had never lived in Europe. Mr. Parrish had never helped to establish branches of Nord Pharmaceuticals in Europe. His position with the corporation was director of research in Rochester, exclusively.

The detective showed me a photograph of Amanda Parrish. Did she resemble me, did I resemble her? I don’t think so. I heard my mother draw in her breath sharply seeing the photograph, but I did not think that we looked so much alike; this girl was very young, really just a child, with a plain sweet hopeful face, unless you could call it a doomed face, those eyes, haunted eyes you could call them, that set of the mouth, a shy smile for the camera which might even have been held by her murderous older brother.

I thought of Desmond’s warning about smiling for the camera. How foolish, how sad you will appear, when the smiling photograph appears posthumously.

The child/sister murder had been a celebrated case in the Miskatonic Valley since the Parrish family was well known there, had owned property in the region since Revolutionary times.

“A tragic case. But these cases are not so rare as you might think.”

It was a curious remark for the New York State Police detective to make to us, at such a time.

My father became livid with rage. My mother was upset, incredulous. They wanted to immediately confront the Parrishes, to demand an explanation.

“Those terrible people! How could they have been so selfish! They allowed their sick, disturbed son to behave as if he were normal. They must have known that he was seeing our daughter! They must have known that the medications he was taking weren’t enough. They couldn’t have been monitoring their son…”

It was chilling to think that the Parrishes had been willing to risk my life, or to sacrifice my life, the life of a girl they didn’t know, had never met but must have known about-their son’s girlfriend.

They would never consent to speak with us. They would consent only to communicate through lawyers.

At that time I could not answer any more of the detective’s questions. I could not bear my parents’ emotions. I ran away from the adults, upstairs to my room.

I hid in my bed. I burrowed in my bed.

So often I’d dreamed of Desmond Parrish in this bed, it was almost as if he were here with me: waiting for me.

I thought, He wanted to take me with him. He loved me-he would not have hurt me.

In Strykersville today there are too many memories; I never remain more than a night or two, visiting my parents.

I try to avoid driving in the vicinity of Fort Huron Park. Never would I revisit Little Huron Lake.

The remainder of my high school years is a blur to me. In the summer I went to live with my grandmother in White Plains, and there I took summer courses at Vassar; my senior year, I’d transferred to a private school in White Plains, since my parents thought it might be best to remove me from Strykersville, where I had “emotional issues.”

My old life was uprooted. My old “young” life.

I thought of wasps in our back lawn, their nests burrowed into the ground into which my father would pour liquid insecticide. In terror, wasps would fly out of the burrow, fly to save their lives, dazed, desperate. I wondered if the wasps could reestablish a nest elsewhere. I wondered if the poison had seeped into their frantic little insect bodies, if mere escape were enough to save them.

I missed my friends, my family. I missed the life we’d had there, our sleepy old dog stretched out on the redwood deck at our feet. But I could not have remained in Strykersville, where there were too many memories.

The other day I saw him. Across a busy street I saw his hand uplifted and in his face an expression of reproach and hurt, and without thinking I began to cross the street to him, and at once horns sounded angrily-I’d stepped off the curb into traffic and had almost been killed.

So near any time always.

Rollo’s body was never recovered.