Still Waters

by John Moss

  “I can’t get any sense who he’s addressing. Whom. He owned a bunch of feed mills. I suppose he knew farmers. I guess he even owned a couple of farms up near where Miranda’s from. Can’t see him in a barnyard, though. He strikes me as urban to the core. Anyway, there’s more.

  “‘Bees are remarkable navigators. They travel far afield in random flight and yet like most foragers they return home by the most direct route possible. This in itself suggests mental activity no less astonishing than the migration of monarch butterflies to the place of their ancestral origins in Mexico. The bee flies home from three miles away with unerring efficiency. Within the hive she conducts a sound and motion seminar, instructing fellow workers on the distance and direction to a particular nectar trove. They travel there directly, following the path of the explorer’s return flight. Communication precipitates action. In fact, it is only by their action that we know communication has taken place. Now, if the returning bee were to be cleaned of pollen and nectar when she reenters the hive, or lost her load along the way, the same patterns of sound and motion would elicit no response from her peers. When one of the key factors is missing from the seminar, worker attention is absent. They cannot extrapolate from those factors remaining that it is in their interest to respond. Despite reinforcement for previous response to similar stimuli, conceptualization necessary for them to take action, even if their survival is dependent upon that action, is beyond them.’

  “The folksiness is almost attractive. It’s as if he’s trying to create a speaking voice with a personality that maybe he can co-opt as his own. This is less about thinking than about inventing a personality for himself as a thinker.”

  “Morgan,” Ellen said.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s time to go home, love.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You want a lift?”

  “Thanks.”

  “To my place?”

  “Yeah.”

  “My place?”

  “Sure.”

  7

  Rainbow Trout

  Miranda dropped the girl off at a well-appointed house in Wychwood Park, the most exclusive but not the most expensive residential enclave in the city, a gathering of interesting houses nestled in a small ravine west of Rosedale that was originally conceived as a refuge for successful artists and their wealthy patrons. She made arrangements with the housekeeper to call back in the morning and gave the girl a warm hug in acknowledgement of the dark secrets they shared, then drove home. Somehow she would find provision for the girl in the will. In her mother’s lover’s estate there were convolutions where the welfare of a young girl could be sustained if the executor was sufficiently canny. Miranda knew that, and she suspected Eleanor Drummond knew it, as well. She felt quite certain, in fact, that she had been declared, by the curious deployment of circumstances, the girl’s unofficial guardian.

  When Miranda got to Isabella Street, it was almost midnight. It was too late to check the car in at head-quarters. She parked in front of her building. Since it was a police vehicle, she didn’t anticipate a ticket, even though overnight parking was prohibited. It didn’t really matter; it had been a long day.

  Miranda closed the door of her apartment behind her and felt a sense of relief. She had left the computer on all day, and she cranked it up, half expecting to find another message from kumonryu.ca, but there was only junk. Miranda deleted everything from the in box except Robert Griffin’s directive. Tomorrow she would have the tech people check it out, and she would call the fish man in North York, and get him on the case. She could delegate responsibilities; she had the authority and she had the funds.

  She couldn’t remember whether she had eaten dinner or not. It was a hot evening, the last of Indian summer, and before she was completely undressed she wandered back into the kitchen, took a yogourt container out of the fridge, and scooped a few big spoonfuls into her mouth. Then she decided she wasn’t hungry anymore, resealed the plastic container, and put it back. Feeling the moral necessity for proper nutrition, she reached into a cupboard, lifted out a large jar of peanut butter, and ladled some into her mouth with a tablespoon. After she replaced the jar in the cupboard, she meandered back into the bathroom, pleased with her slovenly rebellion. Looking at herself in the mirror, with her mouth clacking from the peanut butter, she grinned. “I know better. I really do.”

  With the ambient light of the city on a hot night washing through her apartment, Miranda left the bathroom, lay down naked on her bed, and covered herself with a sheet. She felt as if she were in an undersea grotto. On her back, with her head low on a pillow, her body fully extended, arms at her sides, hands folded in repose across her abdomen, she let her eyes wander through the depths of the bedroom, the walls wavering and indistinct, details obscure. Then, quite unafraid, she grasped the sheet and drew it aside so that she could lie in exact emulation of the body of the woman at the morgue. Eyes no longer moving, she lay perfectly still except for the tidal motion of her chest, rising and falling, perfectly quiet apart from the muffled throb of her heart.

  Miranda was aware of what she was doing. It didn’t seem morbid but strangely comforting, as if she were connecting to another human being in an authentic way. She was naked and vulnerable, but there was no dread, only a sense of relief, as if she had discovered something about herself that couldn’t be expressed in words or images but was captured in a feeling that seemed to flood over her from outside, that wasn’t mystical and was vaguely erotic, that seemed to come from her memory of the dead woman in control of her own presence even in death. Miranda alive felt the immanence of death as a release and, smiling sweetly to herself, drifted into memory — dreams of when she was younger and the world was innocent.

  The figure of a rampant gryphon resolved in her field of vision into the graphic design on sacks of feed. They were piled on the loading ramp at the side of the mill, and Miranda and her friend Celia were slipping by, out of sight of workers in the background who were filling bags at a chute. She could glimpse herself from a vantage overhead, and it seemed at the same time she could see through the eyes of the seventeen-year-old version of herself she observed.

  The mill was up and over the hill from the village on a millrace diverted from a stream with a year-round flow. They had walked from the village. It was summer. The mill was among the oldest in Waterloo County; it had been there before the village spread along the banks of the Grand River above its confluence with the Speed River.

  They were going to a special retreat, open and private, where the race and the stream diverged. There was a small head pond, a grassy meadow kept in trim by the folds of the land and the flow of the water. The remains of the original mill were close to a small falls and sluiceway — not much more than a two-storey shed of weathered boards and broken windows, with a rusting sheet metal roof and a dilapidated Gothic tower at one end looming over the dam.

  Miranda was very much aware of herself in her bedroom lying perfectly still, and she was aware of the sun beating down and of Celia chattering beside her, hunched on one elbow, talking about school things and boys. Their last year in high school was coming up — dumb Ontario with its extra year. Celia was going into the nurse’s aide course at Conestoga College and didn’t really need the extra year. She was going to take it in case she ever wanted to go on to university or to be a registered nurse if Donny didn’t work out … It seemed to the dreaming Miranda as if all the girls in Waldron had a boyfriend called Donny. Anyway, Celia was telling her, she might as well do the extra year. She was the same age as Miranda and was in no hurry, so why not enjoy being one of the big kids at last? A senior, only they weren’t called seniors unless they were self-consciously imitating Americans. It was just called “last year” or Grade Thirteen, with capital letters implied by the way it was said.

  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, gi
ving 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.