My Last Innocent Year(64)

I fell asleep and dreamed I was in Room 203. Everything looked the same except Abe was sitting in Connelly’s spot at the head of the table. We were discussing my story, the one about Rosen’s, and Abe asked what I meant by something I’d written about him. I tried to answer, but my mouth felt stuck, stopped up like a clogged drain. I reached inside and pulled out yards and yards of thick white cloth.

I woke with a start. Connelly was still asleep, snoring with one arm thrown across his face. I tiptoed into the bathroom and splashed cold water on my neck. I pulled at my cheeks, stretched the skin under my eyes, the thin skin my mother said to touch only with my ring finger, a habit I never outgrew. The bathroom cabinet looked like every bathroom cabinet I’d ever investigated, and I’d investigated many—a bottle of rubbing alcohol, cold medicine, a pair of tweezers. Under the sink, another typical collection: toilet paper, Epsom salts, a tangle of Ace bandages. I sifted through the soap dish full of jewelry and picked up an earring, an amber stud on a silver post. I held it for a moment, then put it back and left the room.

The living room looked prettier in the moonlight, all the rough edges smoothed out. I poked through the books piled on an end table, Dostoyevsky and Tim O’Brien, a dog-eared copy of Harper’s, a half-finished crossword puzzle. I opened drawers, lifted pillows, checked behind curtains. In one drawer, I found an envelope of pictures from London—Connelly and Roxanne and a group of smiling students, including Daria. In one, Connelly and Daria sat shoulder to shoulder in an English pub; while everyone was looking at the camera, she had her gaze directed toward him. I put the pictures back and walked over to the bookshelf. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I was looking for something. It wasn’t just the thief in me. This was the most intimate thing I could imagine, this communion with the material. I fantasized about Connelly doing the same thing at my house, poking through bookshelves, investigating my sock drawer, my diaries, the secret stash at the back of my closet. I would have watched, breathless, as he did.

Somewhere in the distance, I heard a dog bark, then another. I pulled out the Bible with Connelly’s initials on it, then reached for the one hidden behind it. I opened it and something fluttered to the floor—a daisy, pressed between the onionskin pages. I picked it up carefully, the petals threatening to crumble in my hand, and placed it back inside the book. That’s when I saw the photograph, tucked deep inside the pages of the Bible that was itself tucked behind the others. Whoever put it there didn’t want anyone to find it. You didn’t have to be a thief to know that.

I turned the picture over slowly, letting my eyes blur before focusing them. Outside, the dogs were still barking, politely now, each one waiting for the other to finish before starting up again. The picture was of a girl sitting cross-legged in the grass. She had a pale-pink hoodie zipped up to her chin, a crown of daisies resting atop her blond head. And even though I hadn’t seen her in years, I instantly recognized Elizabeth McIntosh, the girl Debra and I used to see coming out of Dr. Cushman’s office, the one who’d been taken away by an ambulance a few days before graduation. Behind her was a cabin, Connelly’s cabin, the one I’d read about in Time magazine.

Why did Connelly have a picture of Elizabeth McIntosh? And when had she gone to his cabin? I tried to remember everything I could about Elizabeth. Pretty, quiet, an English major, one of those girls who’d read everything. Kelsey said her parents were awful. She had a brother who’d died at boarding school. She ate so many carrots that year her skin turned orange, and her arms were covered with a thin layer of down, her body’s attempt to conserve heat. We’d watched her feed herself with her scabby fingers, just enough to stay alive another day, disgusted but also oddly entranced by the discipline it took to starve yourself and the strange beauty it conferred.

I looked around the room. Had Connelly brought her here, too? Made her soup, poured her wine? Told her she was extraordinary, that she was the only one? I looked back at the picture, studying the cabin this time, the one that stood in a quiet corner of New Hampshire, a place where no roads led and no people came. The cabin where he used to go to write and drink, where he’d smashed a window with his fist and almost bled to death. I imagined Elizabeth there, picking daisies for her flower crown, Connelly watching from an Adirondack chair as she twisted one for him. Then I pictured her in Connelly’s bed, his big hands moving across her wasted body. I remembered the day the ambulance came, sirens piercing the campus quiet. We hadn’t actually seen Elizabeth loaded into the back. Had she walked? Been carried? Was she alone? I fell onto the sofa. How many girls had there been? Was I just one of many, as I’d suspected? And why me? Why Elizabeth? I’d chosen to believe Connelly when he told me I had promise, but maybe it was my weakness that he loved, the same sort of weakness he saw in Elizabeth. Or maybe he just knew we were both good at keeping secrets.

The dogs had stopped barking. I heard only one of them now, crying, a low steady whine. I looked back at the photograph, a Russian nesting doll of lies. I remembered suddenly what Amos had said about seeing Connelly at the general store near his family’s farm, remembered too Andy’s suspicions, which I’d laughed off as insane. Now it became clear: Connelly hadn’t brought Elizabeth here so they could be alone, so he could make love to her in a real bed. He’d brought her to his cabin, where he might have brought me, except somebody else was there.

I brought the picture close to my face. The front door of the cabin was barely visible, but I could just make it out. It was a heavy Dutch door with a big iron lock, just the right size for an old rusty key.