“You remember how I almost worshiped the ground you walked on … excuse the cliché.”
It was my turn to take a breath. “Look, Kelly, a lot of kids in sixth grade, especially girls…”
She waved me into silence, as if we had too little time for such formalized dialogue. “I just meant I thought you were the one person who I might have talked to then, Mr. Jakes. In all the middle of what was going on … my mother, Carl … well, I thought you were the most solid, real thing in the universe that crazy, fucked-up winter.”
“Carl…,” I said.
“My mother’s boyfriend,” said Kelly in that soft voice. “My … stepfather.” I could hear the heavy irony in her voice, but I could hear something else, something infinitely more ragged and sad.
I took half a step in her direction. “Did he … was there…”
Kelly Dahl twitched a half smile in the cold light. “Oh, yeah. He did. There was. Every day. Not just that school year, but most of the summer before.” She looked away, toward the street.
I had the urge to put an arm around her then—seeing the girl there rather than the gaunt young woman—but all I could do was ball my hands into fists, tighter and tighter. “Kelly, I had no idea.…”
She was not listening or looking at me. “I learned how to go away then. Find the other places.”
“Other places…” I did not understand.
Kelly Dahl did not look at me. Her punk mohawk and streaked hair looked pathetic in the flat, cold light. “I got very good at going away to the other places. The things you were teaching us helped—I could see them, you taught them so clearly—and whatever I could see I could visit.”
My insides were shaking with the cold. The child needed psychiatric help. I thought of all the times I had referred children to school counselors and district psychologists and county social services, always to see little or nothing done, the children returned to whatever nightmare they had temporarily found themselves free of.
“Kelly, let’s…”
“I almost told you,” continued Kelly Dahl, her lips thin and white. “I worked up the nerve all that week in April to tell you.” She made a brittle sound that I realized was a laugh. “Hell, I’d been working up nerve all that school year to tell you. I figured that you were the one person in the world who might listen … might believe … might do something.”
I waited for her to go on. Cheers came from the school gym a block away.
Kelly Dahl looked at me then. There was something wild in her green eyes. “Remember I asked if I could stay after school and talk to you that day?”
I frowned, finally had to shake my head. I could not remember.
She smiled again. “It was the same day you told us you were leaving. That you’d taken a job teaching at the high school, that they needed somebody because Mrs. Webb had died. You told us that there’d be a substitute teacher with us the rest of the year. I don’t think you expected the class to get all upset the way it did. I remember most of the girls were crying. I wasn’t.”
“Kelly, I…”
“You didn’t remember that I’d said I wanted to see you after school,” she said, her voice an ironic whisper. “But that was okay, because I didn’t stay anyway. I don’t know if you remember, but I wasn’t one of the kids who hugged you good-bye after the surprise going-away party that the kids threw that next Friday.”
We looked at each other for a silent moment. There were no cheers from the gym. “Where are you going, Kelly?”
She looked at me so fiercely that I felt a pang of fear that moment, but whether for her or me, I am not sure. “Away,” she said. “Away.”
“Come to the school on Monday to talk to me,” I said, stepping closer to her. “You don’t have to come to class. Just come by the homeroom and we’ll talk. Please.” I raised my hands but stopped just short of touching her.
Kelly Dahl’s stare did not waver. “Good-bye, Mr. Jakes.” Then she turned and crossed the street and disappeared in the dark.
I thought about following her then, but I was tired. I’d promised Allan that we would go into Denver to shop for baseball cards the next morning, and whenever I got home late from some school thing, Maria was sure that I’d been out with another woman.
I thought about following Kelly Dahl that night, but I did not.
On Monday she did not come. On Tuesday I called her home, but there was no answer. On Wednesday I told Mr. Van Der Mere about our conversation and a week later social services dropped by the trailer park. The trailer had been abandoned. Kelly’s mother and the boyfriend had left about a month before the girl had quit coming to school. No one had seen Kelly Dahl since the weekend of the basketball game.
A month later, when word came that Kelly Dahl’s mother had been found murdered in North Platte, Nebraska, and that Carl Reems, her boyfriend, had confessed to the crime after being caught in Omaha, most of the teachers thought that Kelly had been murdered as well, despite the chronology to the contrary. Posters of the seventeen-year-old were seen around Boulder for a month or so, but Reems denied doing anything to her right up to his conviction for the murder of Patricia Dahl. Kelly was probably considered to be just another runaway by the police, and she was too old for her face to appear on milk cartons. It seemed there were no relatives who cared to pursue the subject.
It was early that summer that the pickup came across the centerline and Allan died and I ceased to live.
* * *
I find Kelly Dahl by mistake.
It has been weeks, months, here in this place, these places. Reality is the chase, confirmation of that reality is the beard I have grown, the deer and elk I kill for fresh food, the pain in my side and arm as the arrow wound continues to scar over, the increasing fitness in my legs and lungs and body as I spend ten to fourteen hours a day outside, looking for Kelly Dahl.
And I find her by mistake.
I had been returning to the Front Range from following signs of Kelly Dahl south almost to the Eisenhower Tunnel, I had lost her for a full day, and now evening shadows found me south of Nederland along the Peak to Peak Highway. Since there might be no highway when morning came if the time/place shifted, I stopped at a forest service campground—empty of people and vehicles, of course—pitched my tent, filled my water bottles, and cooked up some venison over the fire. I was fairly sure that the last few days had been spent in that 1970ish landscape in which I’d first found myself—roads and infrastructure in place, people not—and true autumn was coming on. Aspen leaves filled the air like golden parade confetti and the evening wind blew cold.
I find Kelly Dahl by becoming lost.
I used to brag that I have never been lost. Even in the densest lodgepole pine forest, my sense of direction has served me well. I am good in the woods, and the slightest landmark sets me on my way as if I have an internal compass that is never off by more than two or three degrees. Even on cloudy days the sunlight speaks direction to me. At night, a glimpse of stars will set me straight.
Not this evening. Walking out of the empty campground, I climb a mile or so through thick forest to watch the sun set north of the Arapahoes but south of Mt. Audubon. Twilight does not linger. There is no moon. Beyond the Front Range to the east, where the glow of Denver and its string of satellite cities should be, there is only darkness. Clouds move in to obliterate the night sky. I cut back toward the campground, dropping down from one ridge to climb another, confident that this way is shorter. Within ten minutes I am lost.
The sensation of being lost without my rifle, without a compass, with only the Ka-bar knife in its sheath on my belt, is not disturbing. At first. Ninety minutes later, deep in a lodgepole thicket, miles from anywhere, the sky above as dark as the forest below, I am beginning to be worried. I have worn only my sweater over a flannel shirt; it may snow before morning. I think of my parka and sleeping bag back at the campsite, of the firewood stacked in the circle of stones and the hot tea I was planning to have before turning in.
�
�Idiot,” I say to myself, stumbling down a dark slope, almost plunging into a barbed-wire fence. Painfully picking my way over the fence—sure that there had been no fences near the campground—I think again, idiot, and begin to wonder if I should hunker down for the cold wait until dawn.
At that moment I see Kelly Dahl’s fire.
I never doubt it is her fire—I have been here long enough to know that she is now the only other person in our universe—and, when I come closer, moving silently through the last twenty meters of brush to the clearing, it is indeed Kelly Dahl, sitting in the circle of light from the flames, looking at a harmonica in her hands and seemingly lost in thought.
I wait several minutes, sensing a trap. She remains engrossed in the play of firelight on the chrome surface of the instrument, her face mildly sunburned. She is still wearing the hiking boots, shorts, and thick sweatshirt I had last seen her in three days earlier, just after leaving Mont-Saint-Michel. Her hunting bow—a powerful bend of some space-age composite, several steel-edged killing arrows notched onto the frame—lies strung and ready against the log she sits on.
Perhaps I make a noise. Perhaps she simply becomes aware of my presence. Whatever the reason, she looks up—startled, I see—her head moving toward the dark trees where I hide.
I make the decision within a second. Two seconds later I am hurtling across the dark space that separates us, sure that she will have time to lift the bow, notch the arrow, and let fly toward my heart. But she does not turn toward the bow until the last second and then I am on her, leaping across the last six feet, knocking her down and sideways, the bow and the deadly arrows flying into the darkness on one side of the log, Kelly and me rolling near the fire on the other side.
I guess that I am still stronger but that she is quicker, infinitely more agile. I think that if I act quickly enough, this will not matter.
We roll twice and then I am on top of her, slapping away her hands, pulling the Ka-bar knife from its sheath. She swings a leg up but I pin it with my own, swing my other knee out, squeeze her legs together beneath me with the strength of my thighs. Her hands are raking at my sweater, nails tearing toward my face, but I use my left arm and the weight of my upper body to squeeze her arms between us as I lean forward, the knife moving to her throat.
For a second, as the tempered steel touches the pulsing flesh of her neck, there is no more movement, only my weight on hers and the memory of the moment’s wild friction between us. We are both panting. The wind scatters the sparks of the fire and blows aspen leaves out of the darkness above us. Kelly Dahl’s green eyes are open, appraising, surprised but unafraid, waiting. Our faces are only inches apart.
I move the knife so that the cutting edge is turned away from her throat, lean forward, and kiss her gently on the cheek. Pulling my face back so that I can focus on her eyes again, I whisper, “I’m sorry, Kelly.” Then I roll off her, my right arm coming up against the log she had been sitting on.
Kelly Dahl is on me in a second, lunging sideways in a fluid manner that I have always imagined, but never seen, a panther strike. She straddles my chest, sets a solid forearm across my windpipe, and uses the other hand to slam my wrist against the log, catching the knife as it bounces free. Then the blade is against my own throat. I cannot lower my chin enough to see it, but I can feel it, the scalpel-sharp edge slicing taut skin above my windpipe. I look into her eyes.
“You found me,” she says, swinging the blade down and to the side in a precise killing movement.
Expecting to feel blood rushing from my severed jugular, I feel only the slight razor burn where the edge had touched me a second before. That and cold air against the intact flesh of my throat. I swallow once.
Kelly Dahl flings the Ka-bar into the darkness near where the bow had gone, her strong hands pull my wrists above my head, and she leans her weight on her elbows on either side of me. “You did find me,” she whispers, and lowers her face to mine.
What happens next is not clear. It is possible that she kisses me, possible that we kiss each other, but time ceases to be sequential at that moment so it is possible that we do not kiss at all. What is clear—and shall remain so until the last moment of my life—is that in this final second before seconds cease to follow one another I move my arms to take her weight off her elbows, and Kelly Dahl relaxes onto me with what may be a sigh, the warmth of her face envelops the warmth of my face, a shared warmth more intimate than any kiss, the length of her body lies full along the length of my body, and then—inexplicably—she continues descending, moving closer, skin against skin, body against body, but more than that, entering me as I enter her in a way that is beyond sexual. She passes into me as a ghost would pass through some solid form, slowly, sensually but without self-conscious effort, melding, melting into me, her form still tangible, still touchable, but moving through me as if our atoms were the stars in colliding galaxies, passing through each other without contact but rearranging the gravity there forever.
I do not remember us speaking. I remember only the three sighs—Kelly Dahl’s, mine, and the sigh of the wind coming up to scatter the last sparks of the fire that had somehow burned down to embers while time had stopped.
IV. Palinode
I knew instantly upon awakening—alone—that everything had changed. There was a difference to the light, the air. A difference to me. I felt more attached to my senses than I had in years, as if some barrier had been lifted between me and the world.
But the world was different. I sensed it at once. More real. More permanent. I felt fuller but the world felt more empty.
My Jeep was in the campground. The tent was where I had left it. There were other tents, other vehicles. Other people. A middle-aged couple having breakfast outside their Winnebago waved in a friendly manner as I walked past. I could not manage a return wave.
The resident camp ranger ambled over as I was loading the tent in the back of the Jeep.
“Didn’t see you come in last night,” he said. “Don’t seem to have a permit. That’ll be seven dollars. Unless you want to stay another day. That’ll be seven more. Three-night limit here. Lots of folks this summer.”
I tried to speak, could not, and found—to my mild surprise—that my billfold still had money in it. I handed the ranger a ten-dollar bill and he counted back the change.
He was leaving when I finally called to him. “What month is it?”
He paused, smiled. “Still July, the last time I looked.”
I nodded my thanks. Nothing else needed to be explained.
* * *
I showered and changed clothes in my apartment. Everything was as I had left it the night before. There were four bottles of scotch in the kitchen cabinet. I lined them up on the counter and started to pour them down the sink, realized that I did not have to—I had no urge to take a drink—and set them back in the cabinet.
I drove first to the elementary school where I had taught years ago. The teachers and students were gone for the summer, but some of the office staff were there for the summer migrant program. The principal was new, but Mrs. Collins, the secretary, knew me.
“Mr. Jakes,” she said. “I almost didn’t recognize you in that beard. You look good in it. And you’ve lost weight and you’re all tanned. Have you been on vacation?”
I grinned at her. “Sort of.”
The files were still there. I was afraid that they’d gone to the district headquarters or followed the kids through junior high and high school, but the policy was to duplicate essential material and start new files beginning with seventh grade.
All of the students from that last sixth-grade class were still in the box in the storage closet downstairs, all of their cumulative record folders mildewing away with the individual class photos of the students staring out—bright eyes, braces, bad haircuts from a decade before. They were all there. Everyone but Kelly Dahl.
“Kelly Dahl,” repeated Mrs. Collins when I came up from the basement and queried her. “Kelly Dahl. Strange, Mr. Jak
es, but I don’t remember a child named Kelly Dahl. Kelly Daleson, but that was several years after you left. And Kevin Dale … but that was a few years before you were here. Was he here very long? It might have been a transfer student who transferred back out, although I usually remember…”
“She,” I said. “It was a girl. And she was here a couple of years.”
Mrs. Collins frowned as if I had insulted her powers of recall. “Kelly Dahl,” she said. “I really don’t think so, Mr. Jakes. I remember most of the students. It’s why I suggested to Mr. Pembroke that this thing wasn’t necessary.…” She waved dismissively toward the computer on her desk. “Are you sure the child was in one of your sixth-grade classes … not someone in high school or someone you met … after?” She pursed her lips at the near faux pas.
“No,” I said. “It was someone I knew before I was fired. Someone I knew here. Or so I thought.”
Mrs. Collins ran fingers through her blue hair. “I may be wrong, Mr. Jakes.” She said it in a tone that precluded the possibility.
The high-school records agreed with her. There had been no Kelly Dahl. The manager at the trailer park did not remember the three people; in fact, his records and memory showed that the same elderly couple had been renting what I remembered as the Dahl trailer since 1975. There was no microfilm record of the murder of Patricia Dahl in the Boulder Daily Camera, and calls to North Platte and Omaha revealed no arrest of anyone named Carl Reems at any time in the past twelve years.
I sat on my apartment terrace, watched the summer sun set behind the Flatirons, and thought. When I grew thirsty, ice water satisfied. I thought of the Jeep and camping gear down in the parking stall. There had been a Remington rifle in the back of the Jeep, a .38-caliber revolver in the blue pack. I had never owned a rifle or pistol.
“Kelly,” I whispered finally. “You’ve really managed to go away this time.”
I pulled out my billfold and looked at the only photograph of Allan that had escaped Maria’s purge—my son’s fifth-grade class picture, wallet-size. After a while I put away the photo and billfold and went in to sleep.
The Year's Best SF 13 # 1995 Page 72
