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out my checkbook, scribbled, and by so doing rented a one-room apartment with a charming ocean view that Wendy Keegan—my lady-friend—never got a chance to sample. That room was where I sat up some nights with my stereo turned down low, playing Jimi Hendrix and the Doors, having those occasional thoughts of suicide. They were sophomoric rather than serious, just the fantasies of an over-imaginative young man with a heart condition . . . or so I tell myself now, all these years later, but who really knows?
    When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.

I tried to reach Wendy from the bus station, but her stepmom said she was out with Renee. When the bus got to Wilmington I tried again, but she was still out with Renee. I asked Nadine—the stepmom—if she had any idea where they might have gone. Nadine said she didn’t. She sounded as if I were the most uninteresting caller she’d gotten all day. Maybe all year. Maybe in her life. I got along well enough with Wendy’s dad, but Nadine Keegan was never one of my biggest fans.
    Finally—I was in Boston by then—I got Wendy. She sounded sleepy, although it was only eleven o’clock, which is the shank of the evening to most college students on spring break. I told her I got the job.
    “Hooray for you,” she said. “Are you on your way home?”
    “Yes, as soon as I get my car.” And if it didn’t have a flat tire. In those days I was always running on baldies and it seemed one of them was always going flat. A spare, you ask? Pretty funny, señor. “I could spend the night in Portsmouth instead of going straight home and see you tomorrow, if—”
    “Wouldn’t be a good idea. Renee’s staying over, and that’s about all the company Nadine can take. You know how sensitive she is about company.”
    Some company, maybe, but I thought Nadine and Renee had always gotten on like a house afire, drinking endless cups of coffee and gossiping about their favorite movie stars as if they were personal friends, but this didn’t seem like the time to say so.
    “Ordinarily I’d love to talk to you, Dev, but I was getting ready to turn in. Me ’n Ren had a busy day. Shopping and . . . things.”
    She didn’t elaborate on the things part, and I found I didn’t care to ask about them. Another warning sign.
    “Love you, Wendy.”
    “Love you, too.” That sounded perfunctory rather than fervent. She’s just tired, I told myself.
    I rolled north out of Boston with a distinct feeling of unease. Something about the way she had sounded? That lack of enthusiasm? I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. But I wondered. Sometimes even now, all these years later, I wonder. She’s nothing to me these days but a scar and a memory, someone who hurt me as young women will hurt young men from time to time. A young woman from another life. Still I can’t help wondering where she was that day. What those things were. And if it was really Renee St. Clair she was with.
    We could argue about what constitutes the creepiest line in pop music, but for me it’s early Beatles—John Lennon, actually—singing I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man. I could tell you I never felt that way about Wendy in the aftermath of the breakup, but it would be a lie. It was never a constant thing, but did I think of her with a certain malevolence in the aftermath of the breakup? Yes. There were long and sleepless nights when I thought she deserved something bad—maybe really bad—to happen to her for the way she hurt me. It dismayed me to think that way, but sometimes I did. And then I would think about the man who went into Horror House with his arm around Linda Gray and wearing two shirts. The man with the bird on his hand and a straight razor in his pocket.

    In the spring of 1973—the last year of my childhood, when I look back on it—I saw a future in which Wendy Keegan was Wendy Jones . . . or perhaps Wendy Keegan-Jones, if she wanted to be modern and