“Mr. Hohn,” I said as we entered my neighborhood. “What exactly is wrong with Emily’s hand?”
“Now that,” he said, keeping his head motionless but swinging toward me his melancholy gaze, “is a good question.” He swung his gaze back. “A very good question.”
We returned to our old ways, Emily and I. It was as if nothing had changed. But I was aware at every moment of the white intruder, drawing attention to itself, demanding awareness. At the wrist it was fastened by two small white buttons. They looked like ordinary buttons, with a glimmer of iridescence when they caught the sun. On their left was a small overlap of cloth, which formed a shadowy opening that revealed nothing. The glove seemed tightly bound, as if it were meant not to slip out of place, so that I imagined Emily had trouble bending her wrist, or even moving her fingers. I wondered whether she took the glove off at night — whether she took it off at all.
In class I watched her sit down at her desk. I noticed that she rested her gloved hand very carefully on the writing surface, where she left it motionless for as long as possible. Once, after a pencil rolled off the edge and struck the floor, she bent over to retrieve it, leaving her left hand in place. Her body, for a moment, was twisted unnaturally.
It struck me that the glove was harming Emily’s grace of movement, penetrating her with a slight clumsiness. When she walked with her books cradled in her arms, she was careful not to let her gloved hand touch them — she supported the weight a little awkwardly with her left forearm. Now and then I saw a red mark on the underside of her forearm, from the edge of her notebook. At home, when Mrs. Hohn brought in sugar cookies and lemonade, Emily would lift the glass with her right hand, take a sip, set down the glass, and pick up a cookie. Her gloved hand, with the slightly curved fingers, lay rigidly in her lap.
I quickly came to know every detail of that glove. It fit snugly over the thumb but less tightly over the fingers. The left edge, where the white glove often rested, was faintly darkened. A triangle of small creases was visible in the place where the thumb joined the forefinger. A spot of blue-black ink showed on a knuckle.
Sometimes, staring at the glove in class, I could feel, on my own hand, the white cotton binding me. Then I would wriggle my fingers rapidly, or massage the back of my left hand, over and over, with the palm of my right.
But there was something else about the glove that troubled me, beyond the sharp fact of its presence. Ever since I’d become friends with Emily, I had felt an easy flow between us, an openness, a transparency. This restful merging, this serene interwovenness, was something I had never known before, something that reminded me of her porch in sunlight, or the night of the snow shining under the streetlights. The glove was harming that flow. It was, by its very nature, an act of concealment. Emily herself, by eluding the question of her hand, by refusing to reveal whatever it was she was hiding under the white cloth, was forcing me to think about her in a secretive way. It occurred to me that the glove was changing her — turning her into a body, with privacies and evasions.
But if the glove was creating a new Emily, a hidden Emily, it was also doing something to me. The peace I’d always felt in her presence was being replaced by wariness, by an almost physiological alertness, as if my body were warning me to watch her closely. At the same time, I was no longer able to look at her whenever I wished. Before the glove, I could turn my head frankly in her direction. Now, I felt compelled to throw furtive glances at her, like a stranger yielding to a forbidden desire.
One afternoon as we were making our way along an aisle of the auditorium, where someone was scheduled to bore me to death with a speech about career choices, I noticed Emily’s white glove knock lightly against the back of a seat. Her body stiffened; for an instant she closed her eyes. Then she continued forward, holding her left hand in front of her as, with her right hand, she smoothed back her hair, in little quick movements, again and again.
Now and then an image would surge up in me, of her hand under the glove — the skin a burning red, or purple and yellow, as if recently crushed by a rock. Maybe there was some sort of scar, a harsh red line slashing across the back of the hand like a trail of fire. Maybe it was worse — a raw shiny pink wound sunk into the flesh. I understood that I was fastening my attention on Emily Hohn in a way I had never done before; that what drew me was no longer her stillness, or her gentleness, but the thing hidden by her glove; and I imagined myself tearing off that white disguise and beholding, in terror and exhilaration, her mangled hand.
A warm day came, taking everyone by surprise. Through the open windows we could hear the engine of a crane as it lifted steel beams at the back of the school. Later that day the weather grew cold, but we knew the turn had come. Icicles on eaves glistened and dripped. The last snow began to melt in the shadows of garages and under bushes hung with brown leaves. Willows, still yellow, glowed in the sun. The white glove, resting in a bar of sun on a desk beside a window, was so fiercely white that it hurt my eyes. Within the whiteness I could see the creases plainly, the faint discolorations, a small darkish stain beside one button. Somewhere a dog barked. And a restlessness came over me, the restlessness before spring, when the world, in that in-between season, is waiting for something to happen.
One night I woke in my warm room. I could hear the heat blowing through the vent at the base of the wall. It seemed to remind me of something, and all at once I saw the blue-and-white-striped pajamas, the tiny dolls on their wooden benches, the glowing snow stretching away. Emily lay in her room, fast asleep. Or was she also awake? Perhaps she had taken off her glove, which rested on the covers, the five fingers slightly curved. At the thought of the glove I felt a pressure in my head, like a thumb pushing against my temple, and when I swung out of bed and thrust aside the white blinds, which rattled like coat hangers, I saw that the sky was a deep and glowing blue, the blue of warm spring evenings.
I opened the front door and stepped outside. The chill startled me — it was a blue brisk night, with a big white rippled-looking moon that made me think of refrigerator frost. I turned up my shirt collar and walked quickly under that moon, a heavy cold stone that at any moment was going to rip out of the sky with loud tearing sounds. In the distance I could hear the trucks on the thruway like low rumbles of thunder.
It was a long walk, and for a while I forgot everything but the clear black lines of television antennas against the blue night sky and the curved shadows of telephone wires like strips of black typewriter ribbon stretching across one side of the road. After a while I came to a familiar neighborhood. Porch screens, catching the moonlight, became for an instant opaque aluminum walls, which suddenly vanished to reveal shadowy wicker chairs and leaning bicycles. The windows of Emily’s house were dark. I walked along the strip of grass between the side of the house and the driveway of cracked tar. In the backyard I opened a sloping door and descended six steps. At the cellar door I reached up for the hidden key.
I made my way slowly through the dark cellar, lit here and there by long rectangles of moon-glow, and climbed the wooden stairs to the upper door. It opened onto a small space off the kitchen. A single plate leaned in the dish rack. I passed into the living room and turned onto the carpeted stairs. Halfway up I stopped, with one hand on the banister. Until that moment it hadn’t struck me how easy my break-in actually was. The sheer ease of it exasperated me. Shouldn’t the house have protected itself against intruders? The house trusted the world — it believed that it was safe from harm, that darkness was the beginning of rest. But things were no longer that way. Harm walked in the night. The glove was up there, in her room. It was always with her, always touching her — the white companion.