Who's It?

Synopsis

The narrator refers to an event full of meaning to him that happened many years before in a mythopoeic remembered suburban neighborhood on a summer evening in the 1950s. The memory is of a particular evening when children play hide and seek as night falls in this neighborhood. The narrator becomes Paul, one of the participants, and the excitement of his friends in the game is fresh in his memory. Strangely, during the course of the game there are several occasions when players are roughly handled and in the near dark who pushed whom is uncertain. Increasingly the children begin to feel apprehensive and one by one go home. Paul is the last, along with his close friend, Janie. As they sit at the base of the oak tree that is their “safe” base, it happens again – Paul experiences a shove on his shoulder that feels like a girl’s hand. Janie is scared. She recognizes it’s a girl’s hand. Leaving, she says, “She wants you.” Paul goes home last but is shoved to the ground one more time and hears a laugh. He goes in to the safety of his home. Inside Paul lets his ailing mother know he is in and the door is locked. He reflects that if the phantom girl wants a friend, he would be that friend to her. Alone downstairs in his darkened house he opens the bolt on the front door and waits by the front window. He ponders what she might want, how her hand would feel, what her name is. He falls asleep. The narrator identifies himself as Paul now grown up and more, becoming old. He reflects how pure and dedicated he was to the ghost girl, but that she never reappeared. Gradually he came to realize that this was only a memory, and eventually nothing more than a personal myth with no reality. So with these vague and melancholy thoughts in mind he has stopped by his old neighborhood, as he is accustomed to do, before going to visit younger friends who have invited him to dinner. He arrives to see workers cutting down all the apparently diseased sycamores and maples on the block. As he watches in fascinated horror even the great oak that had been their safe base is felled. Workers looking into its rotted interior cry out and gather around. There in the base is a child’s skeleton. As they all look on the macabre spectacle he alone feels an odd sense of relief. He realizes that his childhood experience was real and that the girl’s spirit had been unable to obtain release until it was able to play with children one last time. That gentle, exuberant touch he had felt was her last contact with this world. Some divine force had mercifully permitted her to play one last time under the full moon with other children before she passed on to eternity. And they had touched.