The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17 Read online

  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 th
an 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.”