By the time I turned onto the road that led to Miss Troy’s house, small rivulets snaked tiny muddy rapids down the gullies that bordered either side of it and swollen brown puddles dotted the surrounding fields.
The dense cloud cover had brought a premature darkness to the valley, so that I’d finally had to switch on my headlights, their beams at last coming to rest on Miss Troy’s house, illuminating the disrepair into which it had fallen, the unpainted wooden slats and leaning underposts, a set of stairs that bowed down in the middle, its crossbeams splintered and jagged, a yard so ravaged with deep ruts and scattered with debris that even in the nakedness of late fall it looked strangely junglelike, thick, weedy, overgrown.
I turned off the lights, then the motor, and sat in the shadowy interior of my car, the rain pounding down on all sides in a steady and disquieting assault. I started to get out, then heard Kelli’s voice:
Though it was dark inside my car, and the air held an autumnal chill, I could feel everything brightening slowly around me, the air warming as it had during the first weeks of that long-ago summer, and I knew that I was going back, helplessly back to that distant time, spinning as I went, like something small down a swirling drain. I stared out through my windshield and winter faded before me. Summer grew out of it like a flower, the brown grass sprouting green and full and lush, the smell of purple violets everywhere.
And then, as if from a great height, I saw Luke’s old blue truck struggle up the mountain road, come to a grinding stop. Then a girl in a white dress stepped out of it, turned and waved, her long brown arm raised high against the rippling wall of summer green that rose behind her. I felt myself descend toward her, like a bird out of the clear sky, my fingers like curved talons. Then suddenly she vanished, and it was night again, warm and clear, and in the distance, a grim, motionless tableau, three figures frozen in a gray light, one of them with her arms folded over her chest, the other two staring at her, waiting, as if for a cat to spring from the undergrowth.
But Mary Diehl did not spring at anyone that night. She simply turned on her heel and strode away, leaving Kelli and Miss Carver standing mutely in the parking lot.
From my place beside the auditorium’s plain brick wall, the word “love” still aching in my ear, I watched as Mary shot past me, her head erect, her arms held stiffly at her sides. She walked quickly, as if she might break into a frenzied trot at any moment, so that as she passed under the nearby lamp, I could glimpse her only as a ghostly blur, her pale skin oddly luminous for just an instant before she vanished into the covering darkness.
When I looked back toward the parking lot, I saw the headlights of Miss Carver’s car click on, bright and blinding, as they shot toward me.
I remember that I shrank away from them, as if afraid of being seen, and fled around the far corner of the auditorium. Standing there, covered in darkness, my back pressed tightly against the brick wall, I heard the gravelly sound of Miss Carver’s car as it pulled away, then made its way down to the main road, swung left and headed toward town.
After that, I had only the silence that lingered, and the echoing word Kelli had spoken so bluntly moments before:
And so I confronted exactly what Mary had confronted, though not openly as she had done it, facing Kelli squarely as she’d fired her question like a bullet between her eyes, but as a figure in the distance, shrouded in the covering night, cowardly, sullen, and now more utterly devastated than at any time before. For I had heard it from Kelli’s own mouth, and so whatever doubts I might have allowed myself before that instant had been swept away. Not only was Kelli not mine, she was clearly and irrecoverably
I ran to my car, drove out to the main road. I intended to drive home, but as I stopped at the edge of the mountain road, I found that I could not do that. The prospect of going there to lie in my bed while wave after wave of desolation swept over me was more than I could bear. And so I turned right and headed up the mountain. I sped all the way to the top, then down again, then back up, and finally pulled into an overlook and sat staring down at the scattered lights of Choctaw until, as the hours passed, they began to grow dim in the morning haze, and then, like separate stars, blink out one by one.
Now, as I sat in the driveway of Miss Troy’s dilapidated house, staring at its small, lighted windows, the rain steadily beating down upon its rusty tin roof, I could remember that wrenching night with absolute clarity. But I could remember the next morning, too, and all the days that followed, moving hour by hour toward that moment when Kelli would get out of Luke’s old blue truck and head down the slope “to meet someone” as Luke had always believed, though at the same time assuming that whoever it was she’d intended to meet that day had never come.
It was hard to imagine how swiftly those days had actually passed, even though they had seemed excruciatingly slow to me at the time. School had limped along, the teachers growing weary with the long year and the prematurely hot weather. Their assignments had melted into nothing, so that only the play remained in focus, and with it, Kelli and Todd, and perhaps even Mary Diehl, though she had dropped out of it by then, unable to bear what I had to bear every afternoon and evening, the terrible spectacle of Kelli and Todd together on the stage, Kelli now mounted on a plywood balcony, Todd beneath her, arms raised beseechingly beneath a flurry of papier-mache leaves, their eyes always intently concentrated upon each other.
Everyone knew by then that they were lost in the stars, tumbling through space. They gave off sparks when they were together, and night after night the rest of us gathered around them on the auditorium steps after the rehearsal, as if drawn toward them by the elemental force we felt in their presence. I remember how the others gazed at them—Noreen, Sheila, Luke, Betty Ann, and even Eddie Smathers—and I know that none of them had ever seen such love except in movies, or heard it except in songs, and that it seemed absolutely right to them, which to me seemed absolutely wrong. Time and again I went through the agonizing process of trying to find some way to get the better of Todd, reduce him in some way, expose him to the withering fire of her disappointment. But each time I came up against the absolute mystery of what he was to her in the first place, the indecipherable puzzle of the love she so clearly felt for him.
Only one thing was clear, and Luke said it plainly.
“Well, you lost her, Ben,” he said one evening as we headed toward the parking lot.
Over Luke’s shoulder I could see Todd and Kelli as they walked together down the steps of the auditorium. They were holding hands, and at the bottom of the stairs, I saw Kelli stop, turn toward him and press her face against his chest. Todd drew his arms around her, and I could see his fingers toying at the thin leather belt that wrapped her waist.
“A girl like Kelli, you have to grab her fast.”
I shrugged. “There are lots of girls,” I told him.
Luke shook his head. “Not like her, there aren’t,” he said.
He was right, and I knew that he was right, both in that I had lost her and in that she whom I had lost was irreplaceably rare and precious.
It was a sense of Kelli’s worth, both to me and to others, that never left me after that, and which I still felt so many years later as I sat in my car outside Miss Troy’s house, listening to the rain, my eyes focused on the one square of yellow light I could see coming toward me from the same front window where Kelli had once stood, waving good-bye to Todd Jeffries.
I reached for the handle of the door, then drew back and returned my hand to my lap. I knew that Miss Troy was waiting for me inside, waiting for me patiently, as she had so often waited for Kelli, sitting in the old wooden rocker she’d inherited from her mother.
I pulled my eyes away from the house and let them dart about the shadowy interior of the car, my ears attending to the hard drum of the rain, as if in an effort to drown out all other sounds, the slap of a hand across a little boy’s face, the thump of a car jumping a cement curb, the whir of an ax through the summer air and, finally, of feet scrambling across a forest floor, a body racing through the undergrowth, my own voice, whispering thinly, the dreadful, secret theme from which had sprung all these other sounds.
Suddenly I was there, absolutely there. No longer in my car outside Miss Troy’s house at all. No longer a middle-aged man, the revered town doctor, but a stricken teenage boy standing backstage at a high school auditorium on the last night of rehearsals, a Saturday night, unseasonably warm and humid, with Kelli only a few feet away, her back to me as she watches Todd go through his death scene.
I approach her slowly from behind, inching closer and closer until I can nearly feel the heat from her body,
