The Last Place

He didn’t speak right away, letting the last sentence sit there, naked and conspicuous, shivering in its exposure.

“That seems a good thing to have learned,” he said at last.

“What?”

“A devastating rejection is often the only path to a better life. Endings can be begi

“If you don’t figure out that life lesson by the age of thirty-one, you shouldn’t be free to walk the streets without a keeper.”

He seemed mildly offended to have his insight dismissed so cavalierly. But he was a pro, he kept going.

“I’m not so sure. After all, there must be a reason why that Robert Frost poem, ”The Road Not Taken,“ resonates with so many of us. When he stops in the woods on that snowy evening, he’s not a child. He’s a grown man, and it’s not clear if he’s happy with the choice he made, simply that the choice mattered. He takes the less-traveled road. And, according to the poem’s end, it changes his life.”

“But he doesn’t say if it’s for better or worse, just that it made all the difference.”

“I’ve always assumed it was positive.”

Tess shrugged. She wasn’t so sure. Frost should have written a sequel to clarify. “You’ve conflated two poems, by the way.”

“Excuse me?”

“You said he stopped in the woods on a snowy evening, but that’s the title of another Frost poem. You know, Whose house is this, blah, blah, blah. Frost is a great poet, of course, but he’s a bit Norman Rockwellian, don’t you think? So good for you, so American, so beloved it sticks a bit in the throat, like oatmeal. I prefer Auden or Yeats.”

“Do you have a favorite poem?”

“Yes-but it’s as much of a chestnut as ”The Road Not Taken,“ if I’m going to be truthful.”

“That’s the one rule here,” the doctor said, his ma

“ ”To His Coy Mistress.“ ” Dr. Armistead betrayed no recognition. “Andrew Marvell. The one about the guy who is trying to persuade a woman that life is too short for a prolonged courtship and they have to go for it right now.” Which was not exactly how she had worded it in her college term papers, but it was succinct.

“I’m not sure I know it.”

“You must. It’s one of those things they don’t let you get out of school without learning.

“Thus though we ca

“A morbid image.”

“That line always makes me think about a song we sang as kids. ”Did you ever think when a hearse goes by, that one of these days you’re going to die?“ There’s some line about the worms playing pinochle in your snout. Now there’s an image.”

Dr. Armistead laughed, which pleased her in some way she didn’t fully understand. “I must say you have a broad frame of references. From the Civil War to Andrew Marvell to pinochle-playing worms. But we’re back where we started.”

“Which is?”

“In the grave, which is a fine and private place. Like it or not, Tess, you are going to die. Everyone does.”

“So far. But I hear they’re working on some solutions to that problem over at Johns Hopkins.”

Was it a coincidence that the old nightmare returned that night? Tess thought not. She opened the French doors off her bedroom and crept out onto the deck. In her perpetually-under-renovation bungalow, this deck was one of the few finished spaces. Damn Dr. Armistead and all his talk of death. Damn her, for hanging out in graveyards and battlefields, thinking about death. Jonathan Ross had been buried more than two years ago, and it had been a year since she had this nightmare, the one in which she watched him die again and again.

The April night was cool, and she wore nothing but a thin cotton robe, but it felt good, clearing her head. She leaned on the railing, looked out into the darkness that was Stony Run Park. There was light at the edges of the view-streetlamps from the major streets to the north and the south. But here, with the neighbors’ houses dark, it was inky black and quiet.

Jonathan had not been her boyfriend, not by the time he was killed. They were something much less and something much more. They had been each other’s first post-college relationship, which had allowed them to mistake one another for adults. They became each other’s benchmarks, former lovers who gauged their progress through life by the other’s achievements. Jonathan had been far ahead of her when he died, a rising star at the newspaper. He was killed for a secret he had not yet uncovered, a secret that fell to Tess to divine and keep. Tess, without a newspaper in which to publish her suspicions, had not been important enough to kill.

Or so Luisa O’Neal had told her at the time.

Was Jonathan’s death the catalyst that had changed her life? Tess could never decide. She had been a failure when he died, essentially jobless and loveless. Now she owned her own business and her own house-a house where the world’s best boyfriend was now sleeping. Her adventure with Mickey Pechter had put all those things at risk. She pulled the robe tighter around her shoulders.

“If you could see me now,” she whispered to the night sky. “I’m doing really good.”

Then she thought of her case, how she must report to the board before the end of the week and how little she had to tell them, how far she was from developing any information that would help them lobby for new funds.

“Well, pretty good,” she amended.

Tess could not leave bed for more than five minutes before Crow awoke as well. He said the temperature dropped when she slipped away, but she thought the real story was that the greyhound sneaked into her spot, and Esskay’s horrible fishy breath would rouse the soundest sleeper.

“You haven’t had insomnia for a long, long time,” he said, coming out on the porch. He was bare-chested, nothing but baggy sweats hanging on his long lean frame. She knew that men like Crow often fattened up in middle age, but it was impossible to imagine an extra pound on him. Impossible to imagine him in middle age.

“I had a bad dream.”

“The usual?”

Crow knew all about Jonathan Ross, but he begrudged her no memory, which was more than she could say for herself. For a young man inclined toward monogamy, Crow had been awfully generous with his charms before they hooked up.

Still, she didn’t want to tell him the truth, for fear he would want to talk about it. And talking about it was only going to make the nightmare recur.

“No, no,” she lied. “One of the flailing dreams.”

“Who was the target this time?”

The first lie had seemed acceptable, compounding it with a second did not. So she tried to get back on honest territory by remembering the last flailing dream she had had.

“My parents. Of course. It’s almost always my parents.”

“Never me?”

“Never.”

“Would you tell me if it was?”

“Probably not.”

They laughed, Tess out of relief that she had come full circle, out of a lie and into the full truth. She had never had one of her flailing dreams with Crow. And if she did, she probably wouldn’t tell him. Those dreams were as disturbing, in some ways more disturbing, as the reruns of Jonathan’s death. In them, she windmilled her arms helplessly, crying hysterically, trying to get someone to listen to her. But her blows were puny, weak, ineffectual. And the object of her assault walked away, unimpressed. Clearly, it would make great material for Dr. Armistead. Clearly, she wasn’t going to talk about it with him.

“Hey,” she said, intent on changing the subject. “Did we make love tonight?”

“You can’t remember? Well, there’s a boost for my self-esteem.”

“My head is kind of fuzzed. Too much work, too much analysis.”