same listlessness followed her down the corridor to the next class, then the next, until at the final bell, she would either join me in the basement or walk mutely to her bus, take her seat near the front and wait to be driven home.
Now, when I think of her in those last days of winter, I see her wrapped in her inward trouble, silenced by its depths, a teenage girl who had suddenly been made to face something she didn’t like, but from which she could not withdraw.
Everyone seemed to have a theory as to what might be wrong with Kelli. Sheila Cameron asked me if perhaps Kelli was having some kind of “female” trouble, and even suggested that she see Dr. McCoy. “Girls get that way when it comes on them, you know,” she said in a quick, confiding whisper.
Luke had a theory, too. “My guess is, it’s finally set in.”
“What has?”
“Homesickness,” Luke answered matter-of-factly.
We were at Cuffy’s, of course, and outside, a cold winter rain was thumping against the window. Luke took a spoonful of his Frito Pie and added, “She’s probably been fighting it for quite a while.”
“But she seemed to like Choctaw before this,” I protested. “Remember what she was like at Sheila’s Christmas dance?”
“She can like it okay,” Luke replied. “But she can still think about the way it was up north, the people she left behind.”
Later that evening, sitting by the fire, my father reading the newspaper in his shabby wool sweater only a few feet away, I thought about these mysterious “people” whom Kelli had left in Baltimore. Perhaps there was a boyfriend still pining for her, a disconsolate friend, a relative. It was then that I recalled the sudden passion with which Kelli had told me that she had no father. But everyone had a father, I told myself emphatically. Perhaps Kelli’s distress had something to do with him.
I tried the theory out on Luke the very next day.
“Maybe it has to do with her father,” I said. “Maybe he’s turned up or written her, or something like that.”
“Who is he?” Luke asked.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. I was reluctant to say more, and certainly reluctant to repeat Kelli’s bizarre declaration that she had no father.
“Well, maybe he’s dead.”
“Maybe.”
Luke shook his head. “My guess is, she’s homesick, like I said before.” He gave me a friendly punch. “Don’t worry, Ben, she’ll snap out of it.”
But she didn’t. And as day followed day, I felt Kelli’s loss as a steadily darkening atmosphere, an aching gloom that seemed to overtake me as completely as it had overtaken her, robbing the radiance from her eyes, smothering that part of her that burned with a mysterious energy.
“Maybe you should just ask her straight out,” Luke suggested finally.
“Sheila tried that,” I told him, “but Kelli really didn’t say much.”
“Well, she’s got to be talking to somebody,” Luke said emphatically.
Then it occurred to me that there was at least one other person I could consult. From time to time during the last few days, I’d spotted Kelli talking briefly with Noreen, the two of them walking together in the hallway or down the steps toward Kelli’s waiting bus. At those moments, Kelli had seemed a bit lighter. Once I had even glimpsed the flicker of a smile.
It was at the end of the school day on a Friday when I spotted Noreen as she headed down the walkway to where her mother usually picked her up. I had noticed that her mother was not usually there when Noreen reached the pickup point, and that Noreen often had to wait for quite some time beside the short brick columns at the end of the sidewalk, sometimes leaning wearily against them, angry and exasperated.
It was very cold that day, and she looked nearly frozen as I approached her. Her face was red with the cold, and her eyes were squeezed together so tightly I could barely make out their color.
She answered my greeting glumly, her eyes glancing irritably up the street. “It’s freezing.”
“Waiting for your mother?”
“Like always. She’s never on time.”
“I could take you home,” I told her.
She looked at me, clearly surprised by the offer. Then she said, “I’d better wait for my mother.”
I smiled. “Why? She doesn’t wait for you.”
It had been a clever response, and Noreen clearly appreciated the hint of revenge against her mother that was embedded in it.
“Okay, let’s go,” she said with a sudden relish. “It’ll teach her to be late in weather like this.”
On the way to Noreen’s house we talked about trivial things until I finally summoned the will to bring up Kelli Troy.
“Kelli’s been acting strange,” I said casually, as if it were no more than an aside.
Noreen nodded, but said nothing.
“What do you reckon’s the matter with her?”
Noreen shrugged.
I waited a moment longer, then added, “She hardly talks to me anymore.”
Noreen’s eyes flashed a sudden recognition. “That’s why you offered to give me a ride, isn’t it? You just wanted to get me to tell you stuff about Kelli.”
I looked at her helplessly but said nothing. I had sought only to use her, and she was far too clever not to have noticed. There was no point in pretending that I’d had any other purpose in mind.
“You should have just come right out and told me that’s what you were after,” Noreen said, the sharpness still in her voice. “If you want to talk about Kelli, we’ll talk about Kelli. I’m not as stupid as you think, Ben. I know you’re in love with Kelli,” she said.
Did she hope I might deny it? When I didn’t, I saw a strange disappointment appear briefly, then vanish from her eyes. “What do you want to know about Kelli?” she asked wearily, as if accepting a role she had not wanted but was willing to perform.
“It’s just that she’s been acting strange,” I said weakly, “and I was wondering if you had any idea what’s bothering her.”
Noreen shook her head. “No, I don’t,” she said. “We’re not like that. We’re not close.”
“But I see you talking together sometimes.”
“It’s not really talking,” Noreen said. “Not like you mean. Not serious. Just chitchat.”
I nodded weakly. “Okay. I just thought I’d ask.”
We rode in silence after that; then, as we neared Noreen’s house, I felt her hand touch mine.
“Ben, I didn’t mean to get mad at you before,” she said softly. “I know what you’re going through. I know it’s hard to deal with.”
I discarded the last remnants of my disguise. “Yes, it is,” I told her in what struck me as a deep admission, one that left me terribly exposed.
She smiled sadly, a knowing smile, full of acceptance, and I saw the woman she would soon become, and be forever after that.
“I don’t know what to do,” I told her.
She nodded slowly, then made the darkest and most tragic pronouncement I had ever heard. “When you love someone, it doesn’t make them love you back,” she said.
She said it only once, and in all the years since then, she has not repeated it.
But she has said other things, and they have often borne a kindred somberness. Several years ago, while at a medical convention in Atlanta, we went to a foreign movie, the sort that never comes to the theaters in Choctaw. It was about Camille Claudel, the woman who’d loved Rodin so madly, loved him to distraction, her love rushing her wildly over the brink of a dreadful folly.
Afterward, back at our hotel, Noreen and I settled into bed, my arms draped lightly around her shoulders, her head pressed against my chest.
“Everyone deserves to be loved like Rodin was,” I said thoughtlessly, hoping to do no more than initiate a bit
