“I saw her, too,” Perry said, holding out the brush to them. “At the same time. Here. I saw her with my own eyes.”
“Perry,” Professor Polson said, taking a step toward him. “What do you mean?”
“I went back there. I left the car, and I got down on my hands and knees, and I crawled through the Barbers’ backyard, and I found a window with a little crack in the curtain, and I put my hands up to it—”
At first, he could see almost nothing through that crack, but every other window had a shade pulled so tight he could see nothing at all through those. So he’d stood there with his hands pressed against the pane long after his hands had gone numb, staring at a little place between what appeared to be a china hutch and the dangling chains of a cuckoo clock, watching the shadows come and go against it, listening to the muttering of voices, and a few high notes of laughter, but mostly serious-sounding voices.
Now and then Mrs. Werner passed before him—Perry recognized the gray-blue dress she’d been wearing, and then another female form: Mary? Constance?
There was a soft gray sweater.
There was what looked like a plaid skirt.
He saw one pair of female arms bearing what must have been Grouch in her arms, and a few times Mr. Werner came and went in a yellow shirt. Finally, Perry was about to leave. (What the hell am I doing? he’d thought.) The snow had soaked through his jacket all the way to his skin, and he realized that he was standing in the perfect place where, if one of the neighbors decided to turn on their porch light, he’d be illuminated for everyone to see, and there would be no way to get away except by scaling their picket fence, and then—
And then she was leaning over.
She was picking up something she’d dropped on the floor.
Her hair was the flaxen blond he remembered from elementary school—whispering around her face, curling around the curve of her upper arm.
Volleyball. Reaching up with that arm, to serve, to spike.
His bed.
She’d rolled over and swung it over his chest and said, “Craig would just die if he walked in here now.”
And he’d said into the nape of the neck he was staring at now, “And why does that make you laugh?”
And she’d laughed.
Now she laughed. Her familiar laugh. She managed to pick up whatever it was she’d dropped and stick it back into her flossy hair (a comb, a barrette), and just at that moment she turned to the window and fixed him with a look he also knew:
Hide and Seek in the Coxes’ backyard.
I see you.
Her lips were redder than he remembered, and her cheeks were flushed—not that different from the flush on the cheeks of her mother—and her eyes seem to flash in his direction, and she tilted back her head toward the ceiling, and when she laughed he could see her teeth brighten in the overhead light, and he could feel through his whole body the sharp stabbing pain of her laugh.