When I looked back toward the parking lot, I saw the headlights of Miss Carver’s car click on, bright and blinding, as they shot toward me.
I remember that I shrank away from them, as if afraid of being seen, and fled around the far corner of the auditorium. Standing there, covered in darkness, my back pressed tightly against the brick wall, I heard the gravelly sound of Miss Carver’s car as it pulled away, then made its way down to the main road, swung left and headed toward town.
After that, I had only the silence that lingered, and the echoing word Kelli had spoken so bluntly moments before: love.
And so I confronted exactly what Mary had confronted, though not openly as she had done it, facing Kelli squarely as she’d fired her question like a bullet between her eyes, but as a figure in the distance, shrouded in the covering night, cowardly, sullen, and now more utterly devastated than at any time before. For I had heard it from Kelli’s own mouth, and so whatever doubts I might have allowed myself before that instant had been swept away. Not only was Kelli not mine, she was clearly and irrecoverably his.
I ran to my car, drove out to the main road. I intended to drive home, but as I stopped at the edge of the mountain road, I found that I could not do that. The prospect of going there to lie in my bed while wave after wave of desolation swept over me was more than I could bear. And so I turned right and headed up the mountain. I sped all the way to the top, then down again, then back up, and finally pulled into an overlook and sat staring down at the scattered lights of Choctaw until, as the hours passed, they began to grow dim in the morning haze, and then, like separate stars, blink out one by one.
Now, as I sat in the driveway of Miss Troy’s dilapidated house, staring at its small, lighted windows, the rain steadily beating down upon its rusty tin roof, I could remember that wrenching night with absolute clarity. But I could remember the next morning, too, and all the days that followed, moving hour by hour toward that moment when Kelli would get out of Luke’s old blue truck and head down the slope “to meet someone” as Luke had always believed, though at the same time assuming that whoever it was she’d intended to meet that day had never come.
It was hard to imagine how swiftly those days had actually passed, even though they had seemed excruciatingly slow to me at the time. School had limped along, the teachers growing weary with the long year and the prematurely hot weather. Their assignments had melted into nothing, so that only the play remained in focus, and with it, Kelli and Todd, and perhaps even Mary Diehl, though she had dropped out of it by then, unable to bear what I had to bear every afternoon and evening, the terrible spectacle of Kelli and Todd together on the stage, Kelli now mounted on a plywood balcony, Todd beneath her, arms raised beseechingly beneath a flurry of papier-mâché leaves, their eyes always intently concentrated upon each other.
Everyone knew by then that they were lost in the stars, tumbling through space. They gave off sparks when they were together, and night after night the rest of us gathered around them on the auditorium steps after the rehearsal, as if drawn toward them by the elemental force we felt in their presence. I remember how the others gazed at them—Noreen, Sheila, Luke, Betty Ann, and even Eddie Smathers—and I know that none of them had ever seen such love except in movies, or heard it except in songs, and that it seemed absolutely right to them, which to me seemed absolutely wrong. Time and again I went through the agonizing process of trying to find some way to get the better of Todd, reduce him in some way, expose him to the withering fire of her disappointment. But each time I came up against the absolute mystery of what he was to her in the first place, the indecipherable puzzle of the love she so clearly felt for him.
Only one thing was clear, and Luke said it plainly.
“Well, you lost her, Ben,” he said one evening as we headed toward the parking lot.
Over Luke’s shoulder I could see Todd and Kelli as they walked together down the steps of the auditorium. They were holding hands, and at the bottom of the stairs, I saw Kelli stop, turn toward him and press her face against his chest. Todd drew his arms around her, and I could see his fingers toying at the thin leather belt that wrapped her waist.
“A girl like Kelli, you have to grab her fast.”
I shrugged. “There are lots of girls,” I told him.
Luke shook his head. “Not like her, there aren’t,” he said.
He was right, and I knew that he was right, both in that I had lost her and in that she whom I had lost was irreplaceably rare and precious.
It was a sense of Kelli’s worth, both to me and to others, that never left me after that, and which I still felt so many years later as I sat in my car outside Miss Troy’s house, listening to the rain, my eyes focused on the one square of yellow light I could see coming toward me from the same front window where Kelli had once stood, waving good-bye to Todd Jeffries.
I reached for the handle of the door, then drew back and returned my hand to my lap. I knew that Miss Troy was waiting for me inside, waiting for me patiently, as she had so often waited for Kelli, sitting in the old wooden rocker she’d inherited from her mother.
I pulled my eyes away from the house and let them dart about the shadowy interior of the car, my ears attending to the hard drum of the rain, as if in an effort to drown out all other sounds, the slap of a hand across a little boy’s face, the thump of a car jumping a cement curb, the whir of an ax through the summer air and, finally, of feet scrambling across a forest floor, a body racing through the undergrowth, my own voice, whispering thinly, the dreadful, secret theme from which had sprung all these other sounds. He wouldn’t, if he knew.
Suddenly I was there, absolutely there. No longer in my car outside Miss Troy’s house at all. No longer a middle-aged man, the revered town doctor, but a stricken teenage boy standing backstage at a high school auditorium on the last night of rehearsals, a Saturday night, unseasonably warm and humid, with Kelli only a few feet away, her back to me as she watches Todd go through his death scene.
I approach her slowly from behind, inching closer and closer until I can nearly feel the heat from her body, smell the long black curls that fall across her shoulders. She is wearing a sleeveless dress, cut low in the back, and I can see a line of sweat as it makes its way down the long brown plane of her back. She does not hear me as I come up behind her. She is concentrating on Todd. He is lying next to the fallen Paris, the poison already rising toward his lips. I stop directly behind her, raise a single finger and press it nearer and nearer to her flesh, so near that I can feel the heat of her skin, the dampness of her sweat.
In the distance, I hear Todd as he gives Romeo’s final line:
Thus with a kiss I die.
I hear Kelli sigh, then the cast begin to applaud, and I quickly draw my hand away from her and sink it deep into my pocket.
Todd heaves a sigh of death, remains motionless a moment, then leaps to his feet. The other cast members are still applauding him. He nods to them shyly, then heads off the stage, striding toward Kelli, his feet in the dark brown house shoes he is using as part of his costume.
He comes up quickly and sweeps Kelli into his arms. I turn away, pretending to busy myself with the wineglasses that are on the prop table. He is gone by the time I look back toward the stage, and once again Kelli is standing alone, facing the stage, her back to me, her hand gripping the thick gray rope that opens and closes the curtain.