Still Waters (16 page)

Celia finally ran out of steam and lay back on the grass beside Miranda. They had stripped to their panties when they got there. They had been doing this for years, coming to this secret place, playing and sunbathing, just the two of them, and sun damage wasn't yet an issue. On
a verbal cue they both rolled to the right, giggled, and drifted off into separate dream worlds. After about ten minutes, on cue, they both rolled to the left, giggled, and settled back into their constructed reveries. And so on through the remembered afternoon.

All the times they had done that, over the summers of their youth, seemed to meld together in Miranda's mind, and she nearly wept for the lost innocence while she lay still as a corpse in the heart of the city, knowing the world had never been innocent, fearing the illusion would collapse if she peered at it too closely, yet wanting to look closer and closer, to remember how it was. She couldn't sleep, didn't want to sleep, wished the images to return of the last time she and Celia went to their place by the old mill.

“Roll over, roll over,” Celia chanted, and they rolled onto their backs, glancing up into the bright cloudless sky of midsummer, listening to the cicadas sing, the hot grass singing.

After a while, Celia stood and walked to the water's edge beside the small dam. Turning toward the pool at the bottom of the dam, she called to Miranda, “I used to fish here.” She walked back to continue her story. “Russell Livingston and I, can you imagine? When I was seven and eight years old, he'd come and get me the first day of trout season before sunrise. He'd just be standing out by the road in front of the house, waiting. I guess we would have arranged it. He knew I'd wake up. We'd come here and catch rainbow trout, one or two each, and he'd clean them and we'd cook them on sticks over the fire. Sometimes we'd catch a few shiners, but there's nothing to a shiner but glitter, and he'd throw them back. Sometimes Russell would bring a can of beans and we'd eat from the can with a cedar spoon he'd split from the
stump there, and we'd smell all of smoke and cooked fish and cedar, and he'd take me home. I wore a green sweater with diamonds one year. It was his sweater and I was cold and he let me wear it the whole morning, and when he took me home, he took it back …”

“What happened to Russell?” asked Miranda as if she had never heard the story before.

“He just moved away. Nothing happened to him.”

“I never had a brother,” said Miranda as if they didn't know everything about each other.

“Neither did I,” said Celia, “unless you count Russell. Do you remember how poor he was?”

“Sometimes he came to school with rat bites from sleeping with his hands outside the covers. He said it was his own fault. There was no floor. Somebody tore their house down after they moved.”

“Condemned,” said Celia, thrilled by the word. “The place was condemned.”

Miranda watched as her friend waded into the pond. Celia had a grown-up body, not like Miranda's, which still seemed new, like something she was wearing. Celia had filled out early — by the summer they were twelve, she was well on her way to being a woman, as if childhood had just been a gathering place to get the requisite parts in order, a prelude before real life began. For Miranda, who that earlier summer had revelled in her girlishness, striding and skipping and running and dancing everywhere that forward motion was possible, being nearly naked beside Celia then was an exhilarating revelation, for she had never seen a woman's body. Her mother and sister were obsessively private, and this … this was what she would become, this would be her. She and Celia had always been alike, and she fell in love the summer she was twelve with her
friend's body, which she would fill one day with her whole irrepressible being.

Miranda stirred in the mottled light seeping in from the city. She couldn't remember loving her body, just that she had. Miranda had long lived in a world where her body and mind seemed related only by common experience, not birth. The face of Jason Rodriguez intruded without words and swirled away. What had she needed from him, what couldn't he give? He was a mirror that swallowed up images. When he came to mind, she couldn't remember herself, her RCMP history, nothing of romance. Celia leered from the water's edge and turned away.

From the perspective of seventeen, she recalled the girl she was that summer with fond regret, and as she watched Celia stepping gingerly about in the shallows, she felt a strong affection for this young woman whose life, Miranda now realized, would be so very different from her own. She lay back, and after a while, Celia joined her, flicking water from her hair across Miranda's outstretched body, then reclining beside her.

After a few minutes, she whispered, “Miranda.”

“What?”

“There's somebody watching us.”

Miranda sat bolt upright, drawing her knees tightly against her chest, wrapping herself around what she called her private parts, between her legs and breasts.

“It's okay,” said Celia. “It's nothing. I just had a feeling. There's no one around. Anyway, who cares? There's still plenty of sun.”

They both scanned the horizon, their gaze coming to rest on the ruins of the old mill not forty feet away on the other side of the dam.

“That's the only place anyone could be,” said Miranda. Then she got up and purposely without
retrieving her clothes, wearing only her panties, she walked over to the base of the mill. “Anyone there? Hey, pervert, you there? You, there, pervert!” There was no sound, nothing stirred. “The hell with you!”

As she walked back to where Celia was still sitting on the ground, she let her hips swing and thrust back her shoulders to lift her breasts, each step delivering her entire frame into the next exaggerated motion and the next, a woman, she felt, and she experienced an unfamiliar and vaguely embarrassing sense of empowerment.

They agreed that if it had been boys from the village, the boys would have whooped in triumph and run off, allowing the girls to giggle and fuss. If it had been mill workers, who were older, it would have been more awkward; they would have whistled to give themselves away and then stood boldly watching while the girls covered their nakedness and fled. But Celia had only sensed an intruder, and Miranda had spontaneously concurred. They had seen no one, heard no one — both thought of it as a single person, which was more sinister.

They stretched out in the sun again, self-consciously languid, their nakedness now an act of defiance. They talked with a certain urgency about private things, as if they could cover themselves from prying eyes under a mantle of intimacy. They were reasonably certain no one was watching but shared a vague apprehension that their first instincts had been right. They talked about sex — Celia and Donny were lovers; Miranda was technically a virgin. At that point in her life Miranda delighted in her mother's massager and liked boys better as friends. They both agreed that nothing beat a long lingering gentle mouth-watering bodice-busting kiss. They would be friends forever, but it would be these last moments that they would carry with them. They both knew that.
When they got dressed, they were a little self-conscious. And when they parted at the top of the hill, they hugged as if they were each going on such a long journey that they had no idea when it would end.

Celia spent the rest of August with Donny, and in October she dropped out of school and got married. Miranda was a bridesmaid. “I'm not pregnant, Miranda,” she said. “I just want to get married. When you know you're going to do something sooner or later, you might just as well do it now.”

Miranda thought that argument would be a logical justification for suicide, but said nothing. She was disappointed when the baby came, mostly because Celia had lied to her. She went to the baby shower, but the only ones there were Donny's sisters and their friends, and she left early.

Twitching and withdrawing uneasily from her funereal pose on the bed, Miranda raised herself and went into the kitchen. She took a cold cider from the fridge. Celia was a grandmother now, she thought. They were both only in their thirties, and yet Celia was two generations older than Miranda. Celia had looked happy at the funeral for Miranda's mother. Her friend had never really known her mom; she had come to the funeral to see her. Celia had looked good, so had Donny — Donald, he had corrected, giving her his card in front of her mother's casket. Insurance.

Miranda guzzled half the cider and walked back into the bedroom. Placing the unfinished bottle on her night table, she stretched out again in state and waited for the memories to return.

It wasn't until that night, twenty years ago, when she was lying in bed much as she was now, so that the two times merged and she could feel the chill of recognition
as if it were happening for the first time, that she realized what she and Celia had sensed earlier in the day was an absence.

In her mind now she saw a flurry of grey feathers swirling about the eaves of the tower as pigeons darted about, swooping and squabbling, but there was no sound, only quietness reinforced by the soft, liquid hush of water sheeting over the dam and sliding down the flume into the trout pool. There was always the sound of birds, and today there was none. They would have heard someone in the tower unless he had been there first, unless he had been waiting. And the birds stayed away. The power she had felt that afternoon dissipated, and she fell asleep in the arms of her older self, who recognized the feelings clutching at their insides as the feeling of violation. The waking Miranda was afraid. She had to go back there, to finish the summer out, to remember what had happened.

She got up and put on pajamas. She poured back the rest of the cider in a couple of swallows, then went to the fridge and got another. Taking it with her, she curled up in the comfy armchair she had brought from her mother's. It had been her father's chair, and she sometimes sat in it for security. She missed him more than her mother. It was as if his not being there through her teens was just beginning to catch up with her, as if she were grieving retroactively. But that, of course, didn't make sense; there was no time limit on grief. Maybe she was only ready now to deal with it. Back then it just seemed as if he had let them all down, especially her. Her sister and her mother had each other; she was his special person. It scared her that she couldn't remember him clearly — more the emotions he invoked than the man himself. He must have been her age about now when he died. She had never worked out the equation.

“I went back,” she said suddenly, then looked around as if embarrassed that she might have been overheard. “Damn,” she declared to the room, “I'll talk out loud if I want.”

But she had nothing more to say and sank back into the cushions. Almost immediately she was engulfed in a silent fluttering of pigeons, and then through the billowing grey, the crisp orange image of a rampant gryphon loomed forward, divided, and swooped by on either side of her. Still at some level awake, she recognized the Waldron Feed Mill logo, as familiar to everyone in the village as their own names.

Again she was perceiving the world from multiple perspectives. Her primary vision was through the eyes of a seventeen-year-old, but she could recognize herself from a distance, as well, walking along the millrace on her own, a day or two after last being there with Celia. And she was also aware of being in her chair, caught up in dream memory, feeling the urgency to commit, to follow the young woman who had once been her.

When she reached the grassy spot by the dam, she put down her bag and laid out a towel, books, and a bottle of lotion. She and Celia always lay down in the grass, usually on top of their clothes, and they never used lotion. Still standing, she could observe herself from the vantage of the tower, looking up in her direction. She could see herself walk deliberately toward the tower. Then her vision shifted and she watched her hand reach out and push open the door.

Inside, the light was sliced by the sun's rays streaking between the wallboards. There were great wooden cogs lying askew and a large wheel hanging from an axle at floor level into a watery trough. A narrow wooden stairway was outlined in shadow against the back wall.
Carefully making her way through the accumulated detritus from ages of neglect, she reached the bottom of the stairs.

“Is there anyone there?” she called into the shadows of the ancient rafters. “Are you there?” She took a few tentative steps. “I'm coming up. It's just me. I'm coming up.”

She ascended slowly into the gloom of the second floor, intuitively chilled by the absence of cobwebs, then edged over to the base of the ladder steps suspended from the floor overhead, leading up into the tower itself.

“If you're there, it's okay,” she said. There was a sudden rush, and she screamed. But it was only a loose tread slipping out, and she regained her poise. She clambered up the last two steps into a small, empty space no bigger than a tool shed. There would hardly have been room for both of them if their voyeuristic secret lover had been there.

“Gone,” she said. “Nancy Drew wins again.”

A single grey pigeon fluttered against the eaves and disappeared.

There was clear evidence someone had been there and left. What looked like a pile of rags turned out to be a down-filled sleeping bag, and it wasn't the least bit musty. As far as Miranda could tell without actually pushing her face into the material, it was more or less unused. She stretched out on it to see what she could glimpse of their sunbathing spot, knowing she would have a perfect view. Still, when she lined up the appropriate chink, she was shocked at how close she was — practically looming over where she and Celia had disported themselves like wood nymphs. She started to giggle at the notion of wood nymphs.

It all seemed so perverse and so innocent. Miranda hunched over in the slanted light and prepared to write
a note with the pen and paper she had brought, but she couldn't think of anything to say. She sniffed the air. If he was a masturbator, he was tidy. The only thing she could smell was the dry, dusty scent of aged pine. She searched for words adequate to the occasion, a quotation, an astonishing turn of phrase, a searing double entendre. Finally, she wrote down “Words are never enough,” folded the paper, and left it where his head would be, near the gap in the boards that revealed her world.