Breakheart Hill

have wanted you to have it.”

I gazed at her, stunned. “Found it where?”

“On Breakheart Hill,” Miss Troy repeated. “Right at the bottom of it, near that old mining road. I guess it got pulled off her finger somehow.”

In a single wrenching instant I saw the whole dark weave change form. All that I had believed for thirty years shattered suddenly into an even darker pattern of irony and injustice. I saw everything that had to have happened for Sheriff Stone to have found Kelli’s ring at the bottom of Breakheart Hill. I saw Eddie whispering urgently in Todd’s ear, telling him what he’d found out about Kelli Troy. I saw Todd’s face, stricken and amazed, insisting that they meet at some secluded place, Kelli suggesting Breakheart Hill. And after that, the tortuous arrangements— Todd unwilling to pick Kelli up, already in a state of anguished disavowal, his car moving up the old mining road, safe in its absolute seclusion. Then the meeting in all its steadily building fury, Todd’s tormented questions, Kelli rankling under them, growing furious herself, suddenly seeing Todd as no better than Lyle Gates, who at that very moment was trudging up the mountain road, and who a few minutes later would hear a low moan and himself enter those same dark woods. And suddenly, I heard Todd’s voice as it had sounded in my consulting room so many years before: My hand just flew out. I’m sorry, so sorry, a plaintive apology that had seemed to be offered to his wife and son, but which, as I knew now, had been meant for Kelli Troy.

For it had been Todd who’d come toward Kelli out of the thick undergrowth, Todd who’d begun to ask unspeakable questions, each one adding to her fury as she’d watched his former greatness sink beneath a pool of hypocrisy and betrayal and exploded love. I saw Kelli’s face grow taut as she glared at him, then angry in the bitterness of her disappointment, demanding her ring back, words flying from her mouth like small flaming stones, striking Todd again and again, until in one uncontrollable instant he had struck back with an unexpected fury, then watched in horrified astonishment as Kelli tumbled backward onto the ground, her head slamming into the immovable stone, her eyes dimming as she struggled to her feet, then staggered blindly up the hill, leaving him to follow behind her, reaching for her, but not knowing what to do, wrapped in his own terror, until he saw her fall a final time, her body go limp and motionless, a moan come out of her, low and plaintive, calling for that help that finally came in the figure of Lyle Gates.

I felt my body quake as I lifted my eyes from the ring. “Miss Troy, I …”

“Please take it, Ben,” she insisted. “Please.”

I felt the ring drop into my hand, felt my fingers close around it. “Thank you” was all that I could say.

“Sheriff Stone never could understand how it got pulled off her finger,” Miss Troy said. She shook her head. “I guess it’ll always be a mystery, won’t it, Ben?”

To have answered no would have forced me to tell her everything, and in doing that reveal the malicious core from which so much destruction had sprouted during the last thirty years.

And so I nodded, and said yes.

She hesitated, then said, “Well, there’s no use thinking about it. People have to accept things.” She glanced toward the rear of the house. “Well, I guess we should get to work now.”

I felt my bones stiffen, my throat close tightly, murderously, as if an invisible hand were trying to choke off my last breath.

“There’s not much to do,” Miss Troy added. Then she grasped her cane and rose from her chair, groaning slightly as she rose.

For a moment I could not get up, but only watched, nailed in place, as Miss Troy headed toward the narrow corridor that led to the back of the house.

When she reached it, she turned back toward me. “Down this way, Ben,” she said.

I grabbed the arms of the chair, pulled myself to my feet, and followed her down a long hallway, the old wooden floors creaking under my feet. Miss Troy walked unsteadily in front of me, her cane tapping at the floor until she reached a plain wooden door. She paused a moment, then opened it and motioned me inside.

The room was very dark, and had a dry, musty smell. I could see nothing more than the blurry outline of a chair, covered with bedding and unwashed clothes, tattered nightgowns mostly, soiled and wrinkled.

I heard Miss Troy step into the room, her voice behind me, speaking quietly as her hand moved toward the lamp. “Thank you, Ben, for doing this.”

Then the light flashed on, and I could see her lying on a mound of rumpled sheets, thin and still, with yellow, nearly jaundiced skin and a wild tangle of iron-gray curls.

“Kelli,” I whispered.

Miss Troy moved to the side of the bed, then bent forward and placed her hand against her daughter’s face. The face drew back slightly, and I heard a soft groan. “Now, now,” Miss Troy said gently. “Nothing to be afraid of.”

“Kelli,” I said again.

Miss Troy glanced toward me. “I know this must be hard for you, Ben.”

I could not move, but watched mutely as Miss Troy drew the top sheet from the long, lean body of her daughter, revealing the dark skin, the slender arms, the still-delicate hands. “She needs a bath,” she said.

I peered toward the bed, suddenly numb, all feeling momentarily shaved down to Kelli’s state of darkness, silence, stillness.

“And I’m just too old to do it without help,” Miss Troy added.

I returned to myself suddenly, like a creature rising from a great depth, breaking the murky surface after a long dive.

“I‘ll help you,” I said. Then I walked to the bed, lowered myself down upon it and gathered Kelli Troy into my arms at last. Her head lolled to the left as I drew her from the bed, the side of her face pressed up against my arm, her eyes lifting toward me, floating, disconnected, beyond even the most tender hold of memory.

Miss Troy stood across from me, her eyes glistening suddenly. For a moment she gazed quietly at her daughter, then she looked slowly toward me, still searching for an answer after all these many years. “Why, Ben,” she whispered. “Why?”

I glanced away from her, down toward Kelli, and saw all the others as if they, too, were cradled in my arms. Lyle and Sheila and Rosie. Mary and Raymond. Even Todd. All their faces small and childlike, their eyes glowing oddly, as if illuminated by their youth, their hopes, the futures they had planned, never dreaming that the path ahead of them might be strewn with invisible snares. And I thought that all of Choctaw must be locked in this same unknowing, the whole world, as Kelli had once described it, with everything that is or may ever be. And somewhere woven through it, one injury compounding another, creating another, one long, dark vein of unintended harm.

KELLI DIED THREE MONTHS LATER, FOLLOWED SHORTLY BY her mother. There was a scattering of people at Kelli’s grave, though hardly anyone at Miss Troy’s. And it is perhaps the spare quality of that ceremony that made Luke and me return to my house that day, made him say, “You know, Ben, I’ve never believed what passed for the real story,” a line that sent me off to Lutton, to the smoldering ruin of a church, and then back down the mountain to my house in Choctaw.

When I reached home, I walked into my small office, unlocked one of my desk drawers and drew out the things I kept inside it, a few scattered writings, along with my high school annual, the one from 1962, the year Kelli returned to Choctaw. It was bound in black and gold, the school colors of Choctaw High, and on the front there was the face of a snarling bobcat. I looked through it slowly, stopping at the faces of those who had meant the most to me.

I came to my own picture, and studied it silently. In the photograph, I faced the camera squarely, an air of boldness in the lifted chin, certain that I know exactly who I am. But I’d been far emptier than the photograph could possibly have suggested. And far more ruthless in my emptiness.

I fixed my eyes on the picture, saw all the lies within it and heard my mind pronounce the awesome judgment I had fled from all my life: There’s something missing in that boy.

And I knew what I had to do.

IT WAS NEARLY MIDNIGHT WHEN I REACHED THE NURSERY. The building was dark, but Luke’s truck was parked outside, so I knew he was there. I walked through the high storm fence that surrounded the building, into a small forest of evergreen shrubs. They stood row on row, potted and neatly pruned, broad and flourishing, reviving the summer air.