The Best American Mystery Stories 2013 Page 30

  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 than 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.”

  “Well, I think that Lizbeth can take care of herself. And I’m watching, too.”

  Kristine laughed derisively, as if she didn’t think much of my mother’s powers of observation.

  “Dreams! The great mystery within.”

  On the redwood deck a few feet from us Rollo lay sprawled in the sun, asleep. His paws twitched and his gray muzzle moved as if, in his deep dog-sleep, he were trying to talk.

  “Animals dream. You can observe them. In his dream Rollo thinks he’s running, maybe hunting. Retrievers are work dogs, hunting dogs. If not put to the use to which they’ve been bred, they feel sad, incomplete. They feel as if part of their soul has been taken from them.”

  Desmond spoke with such certainty! I had never thought of Rollo in such a way.

  He said, “Dreams are repositories of the day’s memories. Or dreams are wish fulfillment, as Freud said. In which case there is a double meaning—a dream is the fulfillment of a wish, but the wish can be just a wish to remain asleep. So the dream lulls us into thinking we’re already awake.”

  “Then what’s the purpose of nightmares?”

  “Must be, obviously—to punish.”

  To punish! I’d never thought of such a thing.

  “Tell me about your dreams, Lizbeth. You haven’t yet.”

  In this, there was an air of slight reproach. Often now Desmond spoke to me as if chiding me; as if there were such familiarity between us he had no need to explain his mood.

  I wondered if the meeting with Kristine was to blame. He knew that my sister wasn’t on his side.

  I had no idea what to say. Answering Desmond’s questions was like answering questions in school: some teachers, though pretending otherwise, knew exactly what they wanted you to say; if you veered off in another direction, they disapproved.

  “Well . . . I don’t know. I can’t make much sense of my dreams, mostly. For a while, when I was little, I thought they were real—I’d remember them as if they were real. I have a recurring dream of trying to run—stumbling, falling down. I’m trying desperately to get somewhere, and can’t.”

  “And who is in your dreams?”

  “Who? Oh—it could be anyone, or no one. Strangers.”

  We were sitting close together on a wicker sofa-swing on our redwood deck. Desmond’s closeness was exciting to me in contemplation, when I was alone; when we were together, always there was something awkward about us. Desmond never slipped his arm around my shoulder or took my hand, except if he was helping me on a steep hiking trail; he hadn’t yet brought his face close to mine, though he “kissed” me goodbye, brushing his (cool, dry) lips against my cheek or my forehead as an adult might, with a child.

  I didn’t want to think that what Kristine had said mig
ht be the explanation—Desmond wasn’t attracted to me in that way.

  But then, why was he attracted to me at all?

  Interrogating me now about my dreams as if this were a crucial subject. Why?

  I told him that there was nothing special about my dreams that I could remember. “They’re different every night. Sometimes just flashes and scraps of things, like surfing TV. Except if I have a nightmare . . .”

  “What kind of nightmare?”

  “Well . . . I don’t know. It’s always confusing and scary.”

  Desmond was staring at me so intently, I was beginning to feel uneasy.

  “What sort of dreams have you been having recently? Has there been anything specific about them?”

  How to answer this? I wasn’t sure. It was almost impossible to remember a dream, which evaporated so soon when you awoke.

  “Well, I think that a few times I might have dreamed about—you . . .”

  I wasn’t sure if this was true. But it seemed to be the answer Desmond was hoping for.

  “Really! Me! What was I doing?”

  “I—I don’t remember . . .”

  The figure had been blurred. No face that I could see. But the hand had been uplifted, as if in greeting, or in warning. Stay away. Don’t come near.

  “When did you have this dream? Before you met me, or after?”

  Desmond was gripping my arm at the wrist, as if not realizing how he squeezed me.

  So it was not true that Desmond Parrish rarely touched me: at such times, he did.

  Except this did not seem like touch but like . . . something else.

  I wished that my mother would come outside to bring us something to drink, as she sometimes did. But maybe Mom wasn’t in the kitchen but in another part of the house.

  Because Desmond dropped by without calling first, there was no way to know when he might show up. There was no way to arrange that someone else might be in the house, if I had wanted someone else to be in the house.

  In our friendship, as I wanted to think of it, Desmond was always the one who made decisions: when we would meet, where we would go, what we would do. And if Desmond was busy elsewhere, if from time to time he had “things” to do in his own, private life, he just wouldn’t show up—I didn’t have a phone number to call.

  He’d taken out the Polaroid camera, which I’d come to dislike.

  “Did you have that dream before you met me? That would be wild!”

  “I—I’m not sure. I think it was just the other night . . .”

  “Talk to me, Lizbeth. Tell me about your dreams. Like I’m your analyst, you’re my analysand. That would be cool!”

  As I tried seriously to recall a dream, as a submerged dream of the night before slowly materialized in my memory, like a cloudy Polaroid print taking a precise shape, Desmond took pictures of me, from unnervingly close by.

  “. . . there was a lake, a black lake . . . there were strange tangled-looking trees growing right out into the water, like a solid wall . . . we were in a canoe . . . I think it might have been you, paddling . . . but I’m not sure if it was me with you, exactly.”

  “Not you? What do you mean? Who was it then?”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  “Silly! How can you have a dream in which you are not you? Who else would it be, paddling in a canoe at Lake Miskatonic, except me and you? You’re my guest at our family lodge there—must be.”

  Desmond’s voice was distracted as he regarded me through the camera viewfinder.

  Click, click! He continued questioning me, and taking pictures, until I hid my face in my hands.

  “Sorry! But I got some great shots, I think.”

  When I asked Desmond what his dreams were like, he shrugged off the question.

  “Don’t know. My dreams have been taken from me, like my driver’s license.”

  “How have your dreams been taken from you?”

  “You’d have to ask the Herr Doktors.”

  I remembered that Desmond’s father was a Doktor. But here was a reference to Doktors.

  I wondered if Desmond had taken some sort of medication? I knew that a category of drugs called “psychoactive” could suppress dreams entirely. The mind became blank—an emptiness.

  Desmond peered at the Polaroid images as they materialized. Whatever he saw, he decided not to share with me this time and put the pictures away in his backpack without a word.

  I said it seemed sad that he didn’t dream any longer.

  Desmond shrugged. “Sometimes it’s better not to dream.”

  When Desmond left my house that day, he drew his thumb gently across my forehead, at the temple. For a moment I thought he would kiss me there, my eyelids fluttered with expectation—but he didn’t.

  “You’re still young enough, your dreams won’t hurt you.”

  I thought it might be a mistake. But my eager mother could not be dissuaded.

  She invited Desmond to have dinner with us and ask his parents to join us, and with a stiff little smile, as if the first pangs of migraine had struck behind his eyes, Desmond quickly declined: “Thanks, Mrs. Marsh! That’s very generous of you. Except my parents are too busy right now. My father may even be traveling. And me—right now—it’s just not a—not a good time.”

  My mother renewed the invitation another time, a few days later, but Desmond replied in the same way. I felt sorry for her, and unease about Desmond. Though when we were alone he had numerous questions to ask me about my family, as about myself, clearly he didn’t want to meet them; nor did he want his parents to meet any of us, even his dear soul mate Lizbeth, whom he claimed to adore.

  It was near the end of October that Desmond brought his violin to our house and played for my mother and me.

  This magical time! At least, it began that way.

  In Desmond’s fingers the beautiful little instrument looked small as a child’s violin. “A little Mozart—for beginners.”

  Curious, too, and somehow touching, was the way in which Desmond played the instrument as left-handed, the violin resting against his right shoulder.

  Desmond bit his lower lip in concentration as he played, shutting his eyes. He moved the bow across the strings at first tentatively and then with more confidence. The beautiful notes wafted over my mother and me as we sat listening in admiration.

  We were not strangers to amateur violin-playing—there were recitals in Strykersville in which both Kristine and I had participated as piano students.

  Possibly some of Desmond’s notes were scratchy. Possibly the strings were not all fine-tuned. Desmond himself seemed piqued, and played passages a second time.

  My mother said, “Desmond, that’s wonderful! How long have you had lessons?”

  “Eleven years, but not continuously. My last teacher said that I’m gifted—for an amateur.”

  “Are you taking lessons now?”

  “No. Not here.” Desmond’s lips twitched in a faint smile, as if this question were too naive to take seriously but he would take it seriously. “I’m living in Strykersville now, not in Rochester. Or in Munich, or Trieste.”

  Meaning that there could be no violin instructor of merit in Strykersville.

  My mother lingered for a while, listening to Desmond play. It was clear that she enjoyed Desmond’s company more than the company of many of her friends. I felt a thrill of vindication, that my sister was mistaken about Desmond. I thought, Mom is on our side.

  When my mother left us, Desmond played an extraordinarily beautiful piece of music. “It’s a transcription for violin. The ‘love-death’ theme from Tristan und Isolde.”

  Though Desmond didn’t play perfectly, the emotional power of the music was unmistakable. I felt that I loved Desmond Parrish deeply—this would be the purest love of my life.

  Desmond lowered the bow, smiling at me. His eyes behind the gold-rimmed lenses were earnest, eager.

  “Now you try, Lizbeth. I can guide you.”

  “Try? To play—what?”
r />   “Just notes. Just do what I instruct you.”

  “But—”

  “You’ve had violin lessons. The technique will come back to you.”

  But I hadn’t had violin lessons. I’d mentioned to Desmond that I had had piano lessons from the age of six to twelve, but I hadn’t been very talented and no one had objected when I quit.

  I protested, I couldn’t begin to play a violin! The instrument was totally different from a piano.

  “You’ve had music lessons, that’s the main thing. The notes, the relationships between them—that’s the principle of music. C’mon, Lizbeth—try!”

  Desmond closed his hand around mine, gripping the bow. As he positioned the fragile instrument on my left shoulder.

  “You are right-handed—yes? It’s a little strange for me, this reversal.”

  Awkwardly Desmond caused the bow to move over the strings, gripping my fingers. The sounds were scratchy, shrill.

  “Desmond, thanks. But—”

  “I could teach you, Lizbeth. All that I know, I could impart to you.”

  “But—that isn’t very realistic . . .”

  Sternly Desmond said, “Look. Playing a musical instrument requires patience, practice, and faith. It doesn’t require great talent. So don’t use that as an excuse—you aren’t talented. Of course you aren’t talented—that’s beside the point.” He spoke as if explaining something self-evident that only obstinacy prevented me from accepting.

  “We could play together. Each with a violin. We could have a recital—people would applaud! But it requires patience.”

  The scraping noises of the violin, and Desmond’s abrasive voice, caused Rollo to glance up at us from a few feet away, worriedly.

  Desmond was wholly focused upon “instructing” me. This was a side of him I hadn’t seen before—there was nothing tender about him now, only an air of determination. A smell of perspiration lifted from his underarms; there was an oily ooze on his forehead. He breathed quickly, audibly. Our nearness wasn’t a comfort but intimidating. It was beginning to be upsetting that I couldn’t seem to explain to this adamant young man that I really didn’t want to take violin instructions from him, or from anyone.