“In that last year that we would be together, Lynelle also taught me how to drive. Pops fully approved, and I was soon roving with the pickup truck on our land and on the backcountry roads all around. Lynelle took me to get my license, and Pops gave me an old pickup to call my own.

“I think Lynelle would have left me a real reader of books too if Goblin hadn’t been so jealous of my reading, so intent upon being included, so intent upon me sounding every word to him out loud or listening to him sound it to me. But that skill—the skill of sinking into books—was to come to me with my second great teacher, Nash.

“Meanwhile, Goblin seemed to feed off Lynelle, even as he fed off me, though at the time I wouldn’t have described it that way, and Goblin was getting physically stronger all the time.

“Big shocker. A Sunday. It was pouring down rain. I must have been twelve years old. I was working on the computer and Goblin cursed at me and the machine went dead. I checked all the connections, booted my program again, and there came Goblin, switching it off.

“ ‘You did that, didn’t you?’ I said, looking around for him, and there he was near the door, my perfect doppelgänger in jeans and a red-and-white checkered shirt, except that he had his arms folded and a smug smile on his face.

“He had my full attention. But I turned the computer back on without taking my eyes off him, and then he pointed to the gasolier. He made it blink.

“ ‘All right, that’s excellent,’ I said. (It was his favorite compliment and had been for years.) ‘But don’t you dare turn off the power in this house. Tell me what you want.’ He made the motions to ‘Let’s go’ and of the rain coming down.

“ ‘No, I’m too old for that,’ I said. ‘You come here and work with me.’ At once I got a chair for him, and when he sat down beside me I explained that I was writing to Aunt Queen, and I read the letter out loud to him, though that wasn’t necessary. I was telling Aunt Queen thank you for her recent offer that Lynelle could always use her bedroom if she needed to freshen up or change clothes or spend the night.

“When I got to the bottom and went to close, Goblin grabbed my left hand as always and typed without spaces, ‘IamGoblinandQuinnisGoblinandGoblinisQuinnandweloveAuntQueen.’ He stopped. He dissolved.

“I knew without question that he’d exhausted himself in turning off the computer. That made me feel safe. The rest of the day and night was mine.

“Another time, very soon after, when Lynelle and I were dancing to a Tchaikovsky waltz—really cutting up in the parlor after all the guests were gone to bed—Goblin socked me in the stomach, which took the breath out of me, and then dissolved, not as if he wanted to but as if he had to—gone in a puff, leaving me crying and sick.