Still Waters

by John Moss

  “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.

  From the tower she watched herself walk back across the dam, spread out her towel all over again, remove her clothes with thoughtful deliberation, and lie down in the open sunlight.

  Why did she do that? Miranda wondered now, squirming in her father’s chair in her apartment. She had forgotten that, but how could she have forgotten? She had gone back by herself almost every day for the rest of the summer. Somehow she had let it all merge together — summertime and Celia and sunbathing and swimming. She remembered swimming by herself, she remembered the feeling of being watched, and she remembered lying in the sun. Celia hadn’t been there, and sometimes she was sure she was being watched and would lie very still for hours or roll over onto her stomach and read until she had to go home, not sure if anyone was there, knowing he wouldn’t be able to leave until she did. How could she have forgotten? Where did she lose the memory of that summer? How could she lose all of that?

  Miranda got up from the chair and went to the bathroom. When she returned to the bedroom, she crawled back across the top of her bed and curled around herself like a small child. It was the next summer, she thought. Something happened out there. Not that summer.

  She recalled the last time she had gone out to the pond. It was the end of August, and the mill was working overtime, farmers were lined up with their tractors and wagons, and one elderly man, the only one not wearing a hat, had a pair of Clydesdales the others admired. There was a sports car they all liked, too, and she had walked by them and gone along the millrace. She must have climbed the tower — the sleeping bag was gone. There was a note: “Sometimes that’s all we have.” Not too cryptic, given what she had written. Then what? She had never gone out to the pond again.

  The next summer? No, she had never gone back.

  Danny Webster? After Danny Webster, the summer she was eighteen … Miranda hovered between the suppressed knowledge that she had returned to the pond and a gaping abyss in her recollections of how she had spent her final months before leaving for university.

  She had gone to the formal dance with a friend of Danny’s who was going off to the United States on a track scholarship. Danny was away or didn’t want to go. He started Bible College in July. That summer she attended a few nostalgia parties in Preston, where she had travelled by bus each day to attend high school for the preceding five years, but she was never really part of a crowd. She got her course list from the University of Toronto and bought some of her books. Her sister was home for the summer, so the three of them, her sister and her mother and herself, spent a lot of time watching television. She remembered great bouts of reading as the high-school experience petered out … and watching television reruns. That was about it.

  How had she endured it? Miranda knew herself well enough to know she must have sneaked off from time to time just to be on her own. She remembered walking down along the Grand River on the way to Galt and clambering up into the Devil’s Cave in a long skirt hiked around her waist, her peasant blouse covered in grime. Once there, she cracked open a pack of cigarettes she had stolen from her sister’s purse. By evening she was sick with a vile nausea that lasted three days, and was addicted to a habit she wouldn’t break for a decade.

  She had been alone a lot that summer. Flashes came back to her of long walks on back country roads and along the river, images of walking and smoking. The summer began to reconstruct in her mind with surprising clarity. But there was nothing about the millrace, the tower, or the dam.

  The whole summer took shape in her mind as an idyllic interlude before she left home. Once she got to university, she threw herself into a new world of study and essays and earnest discussions and raucous parties without partners. When she went back to visit, Waldron had quickly become a foreign place, and her mother was someone she had known long ago. They were on cordial terms, but there was no intimacy in their relationship, and Miranda realized there never had been. They had just played the roles of mother and daughter, and now the roles had changed. When she moved into her apartment, after a year in residence, this was her home.

  She absolutely didn’t trust the notion of an idyllic last summer. It had all been so vague in her mind until now; she assumed she had shuffled it into the back of her memory precisely because it h
ad been unmemorable.

  Miranda stretched out across the bed, rolled over onto her back, and thought immediately of Molly Bray. She decided Eleanor Drummond was the persona; the real woman was Molly. Eleanor Drummond was an elegant corpse, human remains on a slab in the morgue. Molly Bray was a person. She had peered out at Miranda through the mask of Eleanor Drummond, watched her through Eleanor Drummond’s eyes.

  What did she see? What did she think Miranda could do for her daughter? There were connections between Molly Bray and Miranda that the dead woman counted on being revealed.

  Tomorrow, first thing, after she arranged for the koi, she would track down Molly Bray, find out who Jill’s mother was, where the woman had come from. As executrix? As a detective? For Jill or herself? Why should Jill be the concern of the executor of her moth-er’s employer’s estate? Why should a policewoman be responsible for the survivor of a suicide-murder? Jill would become a ward of the court — that was how these things normally worked. There were people to look after the details.

  The problem, Miranda realized, was that she was one of those people. God, she thought, she needed sleep. She needed to sit down with Morgan and talk the whole thing out. She was part of the problem.

  Summoning Morgan into the scene made her feel better, gave her a feeling of solidity, as if she weren’t adrift in a slow-motion maelstrom, as if she were no longer swirling underwater, rushing through a flume into the darkness of some strange satanic mill. Morgan was real. He was someone she could count on, and she folded herself over onto her side and went to sleep with him stretched behind her, the warmth of his imagined breath on the back of her neck.

  At five-thirty Miranda awoke with a start, responding to a click in her alarm clock that wasn’t set to go off for another two hours. She woke up with Sigmund Freud on her mind.

  As an anthropology major, she held Freud so far down her list of significant theorists that she usually thought of him with derision, condescension, or anger. Claude Lévi-Strauss didn’t like Freud. Jacques Lacan murdered him and made a monster of the dismembered parts. None of her professors had a kind word for the simplistic, neurotic projections of the Doctor from Vienna.

  Yet there he was in early morning in late September in Toronto crowding into her bed. Go bother Americans, she thought. You should be in New York, not Toronto. They love you in New York. She was with Ferdinand de Saussure. She was a structuralist, a post-structuralist, a post-structural deconstructionist. Saussure begat Martin Heidegger begat Jacques Derrida. She was a post-deconstructionist! The terms rattled through her mind, nearly emptied of meaning. The only lord of the dark-side she loved less than Freud was Carl Jung. She would take Freud over Jung, Mephistopheles over his insufferable messenger. What do I do now? she asked herself. Go away!

  Then there was a flurry of feelings and images. The tower. The dam. That summer she had lost her virginity.

  Miranda began to cry. She didn’t remember losing her virginity. She recalled the pool, the trout catching edges of light. The dam. She remembered the dam. She wept blood. She recalled the tower and it falling, being under it falling. But she didn’t remember losing her virginity.

  She saw herself walking up over the hill. She saw the feed mill. It was midsummer, her last in Waldron. The heat rose in waves from the steel roof. There was no one around. Close by the mill, she heard cool water running underneath. She reached out and touched the side of a sports car parked by the loading dock with its top down, ran her fingers along the edge of the cockpit, read the insignia, XK 150, Jaguar. It was British racing green. She touched the back of the worn leather seats. She heard a door slam on its spring, heard voices. She moved on past the mill and up the incline where she disappeared into the dark tunnel of cedars that had been planted a hundred and fifty years before to shore up the mounded banks of the race. She saw herself walking, saw through her own eyes as she walked step by step under the canopy of trees, the depths of shadow opening in front of her, myriad bits of light falling through the foliage to illuminate the path in the still, hot air. She heard twigs snap under her feet and heard the dry grasses brush against her legs. She heard the sound of her blouse rushing against her skin as she walked, and she heard the hush of her own breath through her nostrils. She felt sweat slide down her legs and the inside of her arms. She inhaled the deep metal smell of water slipping along the race to the mill, and the lovely dry sweet smell of the withering cedar. Then she caught the scent of the shallows at the edge of the pond and the resinous odour of pines by the dam, and the dark tunnel opened into the glittering meadow.

  Miranda watched herself carefully spread a towel on the grass beside the dam. Then, without looking at the ruined mill, consciously ignoring the tower, she slipped off her blouse and shorts and spread lotion on her arms and legs. Standing, she unhooked her bra and stepped out of her panties, dropped them into the small pile of her clothes, bent to pick up the lotion again, began to sit down, changed her mind, straightened and walked over to the shallows, moved along to the dam where it was deeper, stood tall, addressing the sun, dived into the pond, swam to the shallows, and waded to the shore where she walked back to her towel, sat down, picked up the lotion, tossed

  it aside, and without drying herself, lay back with her eyes closed in the beating sunlight.

  Back in her bedroom, Miranda felt the rising light of day against her skin and twisted in bed to shield her eyes. She wasn’t awake and she wasn’t asleep. She didn’t want to leave the pond. She knew she had to stay, and some mechanism inside her, the impulse for survival that had expunged this episode from her memory, now insisted she see it through. She waited, the city stayed distant in her mind, the sun beat down on her, and perhaps she slept in its heat. When the sun suddenly disappeared, she opened her eyes and a dark figure loomed over her, outlined in fire. At first she thought it was Celia; they often scared each other or shook water across each other. She didn’t move; it wasn’t Celia. It was a male, his outline, a man, not a boy. He was naked, but she couldn’t see his penis, not with the blinding sun behind him. She tried to see it — that seemed to be the centre of the unfolding drama. He was moving slowly, his face in shadow. He leaned down. His hands grasped hers and held her against the ground. She didn’t struggle. He seemed to be manoeuvring between her legs.

  “Don’t,” she said. “Please don’t hurt me.”

  He settled back on his knees between her legs, watching her carefully, releasing her arms which lay dead at her sides. He reached out and touched her breasts, first with his fingertips, and when she lay perfectly still, he cupped them against his palms.

  “Please,” she said again, “don’t hurt me.”

  He responded to her voice, kneading her breasts as if he expected her to respond, but he wasn’t passionate. He was methodical. He ran his hands down the sides of her body and drew one hand across her pubic hair, letting his fingers play in the curls at the top. She shuddered, for the first time beginning to shake, and whimpered. She lay as rigidly as she could. His fingers feigned innocence and toyed with the soft curly hairs, fluffing them out in the sunlight, gradually dropping down into the cleft of her vagina. She froze, but he seemed not to notice.

  He reached under her hips and lifted her pelvis toward his own kneeling body. She felt the earth press through the towel against her back, her arms at her sides, powerless through fear and wonder. He dropped her bottom against the towel and leaned forward. With one hand he guided himself and spread the lips of her vagina with his other hand. Then, after a brief pause, he thrust deep inside her. She howled — one low deep-throated bewildered utterance that trailed off into a sob and finally silence.

  The pain was intensely focused for a moment, then spread in waves through her entire body. He kept thrusting and thrusting, driving her against the ground. She felt the towel abrading her skin, the pebbles in the grass. She felt him large inside her, and it was strangely familiar, like the feeling after orgasms with her mother’s massager, though she had never put anything inside herself.
Suddenly, a tremendous shuddering of the man’s weight ran panic into her like a weapon, and for the first time she pushed up against him, trying to throw him off, to escape.

  He raised himself on his arms, crushing against her pelvis. He seemed to be smiling, but she couldn’t make out his features. Then he began again, grinding into her, and she couldn’t move, couldn’t shrink away. Pressed from underneath by the solid earth, she could only adjust her body to his so that his pelvic bones didn’t grind against hers, his rib cage didn’t crush her chest. Several times he stopped, slid down so that he could mouth her breasts without his penis slipping out, sucked at her, nibbled, trying to give her pleasure, she thought, and felt no pleasure but didn’t feel disgust, only fear. When he came this time, he lifted her as if he were trying to bring her along with him, and when he was spent, he lowered himself gently against her.

  Time passed, and he leaned back on his knees. “Turn over,” he said, lifting one of her legs awkwardly in front of him, across his body, pivoting her around.

  She felt horribly exposed. “Don’t hurt me,” she said. On her stomach she clenched her buttocks and whispered hoarsely into the earth. “Don’t. Please don’t.”

  “Stay just like that.” His voice was dispassionate. “Look at the ground.” With a curiously gentle caress, he drew his hands slowly across her thighs and cupped her buttocks, awkwardly giving them a lingering massage, perhaps imitating affection. “Just stay like that until I’m gone. Give me lots of time.”