“You did?”
“And so I thought we might drive up there this afternoon. It would be easier to explain it if we were actually there and I could show you a few things.”
“Okay,” I said. “When do you want me to pick you up?”
“Well, I thought you might want to have lunch with my mother and me, and after that we could go up to the hill.”
“All right.”
“So, could you come here at around noon?”
I knew that Kelli didn’t want to tell me more about what she’d discovered, so I didn’t press her further. “Well, I’ll see you then,” I said.
“Noon,” Kelli repeated. “Okay, then.”
I told her good-bye, then walked back out into the yard. The morning air was soothing on my bruised face, and I slumped back in an old lawn chair, closed my eyes and let the sunlight warm me. When I opened them again, they were focused on the mountain, and after a time they drifted to the left and settled on Breakheart Hill. The trees were trimmed in green by then, but I could still see through them, all the way down to the dark ground that made up the forest floor, a deep, rich loam that would soon nourish a wild summer lushness. For a little while my mind lingered on its name, just as Kelli’s had dwelled upon it for the past few weeks, but soon I drifted into a different realm than inquiry, and imagined myself on the hill, lying on my back in the warm, sun-soaked earth, with Kelli over me, the jet-black curls of her hair falling all around me, making a tent for my face. I knew that we were naked, that we were making love, but since I’d had no such experience, it came to me not in a single, sharply focused instant of excitement, but in a rich sensual fullness, so that I touched and was touched in every way and in every place at once. There were no separate explorations, no concentration upon any single part of her. I felt all of her simultaneously, in a limitless and impossible wholeness, felt all of her in each part of her, her fingers in her lips, her pulse in her breath, all of life in every touch of life.
I SUPPOSE THAT SOME PART OF ME WAS STILL SWIRLING IN THE eddies of this sensual undertow when I arrived at Kelli’s house a few hours later. When I think of it now, I see myself in a kind of swoon, and there are even times, despite all that has happened since then, when I cannot think of it without a hesitant and very slender smile. For surely, in a certain sense, there is nothing more comical than teenage love. But the smile can hold its place only for an instant before it vanishes into that more forbidding truth, that there is nothing more deadly earnest either.
Certainly, I know that I was in deadly earnest as I joined Kelli that day, and that all during the lunch that followed I felt as if small explosions were continually going off in me. It was as if Lyle’s blows had dislodged something inside of me, a vital part that had always been tamped down but which now stormed restlessly all about, beating against my inner wall.
But for all my inward upheaval, I presented an outward face that could hardly have seemed more calm. I joked about my “war wounds,” as I called them, and dismissed the notion that in fighting Lyle Gates I’d done anything exceptional. Not only that, but I quietly assured Kelli’s mother that Lyle would never ask for more trouble, that she need not fear his knock at her door.
“Lyle’s basically a pretty good person,” I said magnanimously. “He won’t cause Kelli any more trouble.”
Both Kelli and her mother looked relieved by the time lunch ended. Miss Troy even thanked me for what I had done for Kelli.
After lunch, Kelli flung a light sweater over her shoulders, and I noticed that she’d slipped a small black camera into one of its wide pockets. “I thought I’d take a few pictures up on the hill,” she explained as she headed for the door.
It was nearly two in the afternoon by then, but still unseasonably warm, as it would be from then on. Miss Troy followed us outside, her arms bare for the first time in many months.
“Tell your father I said hello,” she said.
“I will.”
She smiled. “Such a good man, your father.”
Thirty years later she would say the same thing, standing beside me in the town cemetery on another spring day almost as warm as that one, but with her arms covered by the sleeves of a plain black dress. She’d come in from Collier to be at my father’s funeral, and she looked older and considerably more weary than she’d ever looked before. “Such a good man, your father,” she told me quietly at the end of the service. She took my hand and squeezed it, and as she did so a thought seemed to come to her mind. Her eyes bored into me for a moment, then she said, “Ben, I was wondering if I could talk to you sometime soon.”
I nodded. “Of course you can, Miss Troy.”
Three weeks later she would appear one morning in my office near the courthouse, and ask a second question, one that for all its mild and unthreatening content would shake me to the bone.
But thirty years earlier, as I climbed into my dusty gray Chevrolet, it would never have occurred to me that Shirley Troy might one day be in a position to ask a question that could instantly fill me with a chilling dread. I saw her only as Kelli’s mother, a woman who’d done her job well, raised a daughter under difficult circumstances and through it all maintained a tight grip on her dignity. That she might later haunt me with her kindness, or give my life its single most harrowing instant, none of this could have seemed possible as she stood beside my car that morning so long ago.
“Well, see ya’ll later,” she called to Kelli and me as we pulled away.
It was just warm enough to keep the windows down as we drove to Choctaw, and as I glanced toward Kelli, I noticed that she’d not buttoned her sweater, but had left it draped loosely over her shoulders.
“You must think summer’s already here,” I said.
She nodded slightly. “Do you plan to have children, Ben?” she asked suddenly.
“I hope so,” I answered, without in the least suggesting that I also fervently hoped that they would be hers as well.
“My mother says that there’s no love like the one parents feel for their children,” Kelli said. “She says it’s different from what people feel for their parents or the people they’re married to.”
“In what way?”
“She says it’s more intense.”
“You really talk to your mother, don’t you?”
Kelli nodded. “What about you? Do you talk to your father?”
“Not really.”
She looked at me closely. “Who do you talk to, Ben?”
I looked at her as sincerely as I ever had, then uttered the last truth she would ever hear from me. “You,” I told her. “Only you.”
I will always remember the smile that came to her face at that moment, how very sweet and uncomplicated it was. It was the last truly gracious moment we would have together, the instant at which I most nearly felt her love.
WE ARRIVED AT BREAKHEART HILL A FEW MINUTES LATER. Kelli got out of the car, slipped off her sweater, plucked the camera from its pocket and laid the sweater neatly on the car seat.
She was wearing a sleeveless white dress, the same one she would wear several months later, a fact that Sheriff Stone noticed when he glimpsed the photograph I took of her that day, then later taped to the wall of the basement office. By then he’d found the car tracks at the bottom of the hill and so he knew that someone other than Lyle Gates had been on the ridge that day, and I can still remember the muted accusation in what he said as he stared at the picture. Same dress, same place. Then he’d looked at me with a deadly seriousness and asked the first of several darkly probing questions: Had you taken her there often, Ben?
I had never “taken” her there, as I explained to him, and on that particular day, as I quickly added, she had taken me.