The Best American Mystery Stories 2013 Page 29

Desmond stroked the chrome handlebars of my bicycle, which were lightly flecked with rust—the bicycle was an English racer but inexpensive, with only three gears—and said he’d seen me bicycling on the very afternoon he and his family had moved to Strykersville, twelve days before: “At least, I think she was you.”

  This was a strange thing to say, I thought. As if Desmond really did know me and we weren’t strangers.

  Somehow it happened Desmond and I were walking together on Main Street. I wasn’t riding my bicycle; Desmond was pushing it while I walked beside him. His eyes were almond-shaped and fixed on me in a way both tender and intense, which made me feel weak.

  Already the feeling between us was so vivid and clear—As if we’d known each other a long time ago.

  People scorn such an idea. People laugh, who know no better.

  “Lizbeth, you can call me Des. That’s what my friends call me.”

  Desmond paused, staring down at me with his strange wistful smile.

  “Of course, I don’t have any friends in Strykersville yet. Just you.”

  This was so flattering! I laughed, to suggest that if he was joking, I knew he’d meant to be funny.

  “But I don’t think that I will call you Liz—Lizbeth is preferable. Liz is plebian, Lizbeth patrician. You are my patrician friend in plebian western New York State.”

  Desmond asked me where I lived and where I went to school; he described himself as “dangling, like a misplaced modifier, between academic accommodations” in a droll way to make me smile, though I had no idea what this meant.

  At each street corner I was thinking that Desmond would pause and say goodbye, or I would summon up the courage to interrupt his entertaining speech and explain that I had to bicycle home soon, my parents were expecting me.

  On Main Street we were passing store windows. Pedestrians parted for us, glancing at us with no particular interest, as if we were a couple—Lizbeth, Desmond.

  Desmond’s arm brushed against mine by accident. The hairs on my arm stirred.

  I saw a cluster of small dark moles on his forearm. I felt a sensation like warmth lifting from his skin, communicated to me on the side of my body closest to him.

  Though I was sixteen I had not had a boyfriend, exactly. Not yet.

  I had not been kissed. Not exactly.

  There were boys in my class who’d asked me to parties, even back in middle school. But no one had ever picked me up at home; we’d just met at the party. Often the boy would drift off during the course of the evening, with his friends. Or I’d have drifted off, eager to summon my father to come pick me up.

  Mostly I’d been with other girls, in gatherings with boys. We weren’t what you would call a popular crowd and no one had ever singled me out. No one had ever looked at me as Desmond Parrish was looking at me.

  Walking along Main Street! Saturday afternoon in October! So often I’d seen girls walking with their boyfriends, holding hands; I’d felt a pang of envy, that such a thing would never happen to me.

  Desmond and I weren’t holding hands, of course. Not yet.

  Beside us in store windows our reflections moved ghostly and fleeting—tall lanky Desmond Parrish with his close-trimmed hair and schoolboy glasses, and me, Lizbeth, beside him, closer to the store windows so that it looked as if Desmond were looming above me, protecting me.

  At the corner of Main Street and Glenville Avenue, which would have been a natural time for me to take my bicycle from Desmond and bicycle home, Desmond suggested that we stop for a Coke, or ice cream—“If this was Italy, where there are gelato shops every five hundred feet, we’d have our pick of terrific flavors.”

  I’d never been to Italy, and would have thought that gelato meant Jell-O.

  In the vicinity there was only the Sweet Shoppe, a quaint little ice cream–candy store of another era, which Desmond declared had “character”—“atmosphere.” We sat at a booth beside a wall of dingy mirrors and each of us had a double scoop of pistachio butter crunch. This was Desmond’s choice, which he ordered for me as well and paid for, in a generous, careless gesture, with a ten-dollar bill tossed onto the table for the waitress: “Keep the change for yourself, please.”

  The waitress, not much older than I was, could not have been more surprised if Desmond had tossed a fifty-dollar bill at her.

  In the Sweet Shoppe, tips were rare.

  For the next forty minutes, Desmond did most of the talking. Sitting across from me in the booth, he leaned forward, elbows on the sticky tabletop, his shoulders stooped and the tendons in his neck taut.

  By this time I was beginning to feel dazed, hypnotized—I had not ever been made to feel so significant in anyone’s eyes.

  Kindly and intense in his questioning, Desmond asked me more about myself. Had my family always lived in Strykersville, what did my father do, what were my favorite subjects at school, even my favorite teachers—though the names of Strykersville High School teachers could have meant nothing to him. He asked me my birth date and seemed surprised when I told him (April 11, 1961)—“You look younger”—and possibly for a moment this was disappointing to him; but then he smiled his quick dimpled smile, as if he were forgiving me, or finding a way he could accept my age—“You could be, like, thirteen.”

  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 D
esmond 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 t
he 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.