The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17 (38 page)

“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?”