by K. D. Miller
Sometimes, if she was working late in the funeral home and had to turn out the lights and lock up after the last visitation was over, she would go into one of the rooms. She would pull a chair close to the casket, sit down and thank that particular guest for being the one. It didn’t happen often—just every few years. There would be something about the curve of an eyebrow, or a certain grace to a pair of folded hands that would invite her to tell her story. When she was finished, she would say thank you again, turn out the light, and leave.
It’s the only thing about the Melville Staines Funeral Home that she misses. But here now is a living man willing to listen. And suddenly it all makes sense. Moving into this co-op, in this particular neighbourhood. Growing her hair. Choosing brighter colours. Keeping her apartment immaculate. Joining the book club. Even buying the chocolate-covered cookie Leo is biting down on. Then setting out today to go to the cleaner’s at the precise moment that he would be coming along, stepping ever closer to that crack in the pavement.
“If I tell you my story,” Miranda begins, “will you do something for me?”
He shrugs. “Sure.”
She smiles. Then she takes his hand, brushes cookie crumbs off the fingers, and presses the palm down over her left nipple. “Promise.”
*
Fiona sits at Leo’s desk, looking at the file that contains his manuscript. For once, he wasn’t there when she got home from work. The bed was still unmade, the breakfast dishes still piled dirty on the counter and no sign of supper.
Her hands shook when she retrieved the key and fitted it into the locked drawer. She has the strangest feeling of being part of a fairy tale. The princess has entered the forbidden place and now holds the forbidden object in her hands. She is convinced that once she starts to read the manuscript, huge wheels will start to turn. A single word will suffice to put them in motion. Maybe she should make a wish first. Let the powers that be know, at least, which way she wants those wheels to roll. She can’t go on fingering her little stone of contempt. She wants to throw it away.
She makes a wish. She thinks back to that night in the communal house when she and Leo stood naked in the kitchen, raiding the refrigerator while the cats swarmed round, tickling their calves with their whiskery breath. She was so full of hope that night. Faith. Excitement. Joy. She wishes to feel that way again. Be that way again.
She opens the file and starts to read.
*
When Leo gets home he is not surprised to find Fiona sitting at his desk in the study. His manuscript is in front of her, and she is reading the final page. He always knew this would happen. And it seems particularly right that it happen now.
All the way home, he kept telling himself that he should be appalled at his own behaviour, should seek out some punishment, maybe even turn himself in. Except there was no crime. Miranda had been very clear about wanting him to keep going, even when it was obvious she was in pain. And he hadn’t so much wanted to as felt that he must. As if he were playing some role that had been written for him. Afterwards, knowing full well that he had deflowered one woman and cheated on another, he searched himself for guilt and found none.
Fiona has turned the final page of his manuscript. She swings round slowly in his desk chair and looks at him for a long time. Her eyes are strangely young. There is something in her gaze that he remembers seeing long ago, but not for years. Awe? And maybe a little fear? Well, her reading his manuscript is a betrayal. So now they have betrayed each other.
He’s starting to get hard. One of his pubic hairs snags on his underwear. Is it caught on a crust of blood? He did wash himself off in Miranda’s bathroom.
Fiona lets him pull her down onto the floor. Raise her skirt. Shove her underpants down over her hips. He unzips himself. Pops out like a Jack-in-the-box. A little raw from Miranda’s tightness. But Fiona is so wet. So ready. They do it once on the study floor, then stumble together in a simian hunch to the bedroom, where she sprawls face down on the bed and he takes her from behind.
Through the whole afternoon and into the evening they doze and wake and fuck. At midnight they’re fully awake and ravenous and go naked into the kitchen to eat.
“Remember the cats?” she says, watching him drink milk. “In that house?”
“Jesus, yeah. How many were there?”
Those are the first coherent words they have spoken in hours. Leo hasn’t asked her what she thinks of his novel. It doesn’t matter any more. He’s going to finish it, whether she likes it or not. He realized that while he was listening to Miranda’s crazy story. Which couldn’t possibly be true. Even though she obviously believes it.
Fiona has gotten her wish. She is filled with an immense gladness that she thinks has to do with what she read that afternoon. In fact, it is owing to the tiniest of breachings taking place deep inside her body.
*
It was so important to the grown-ups that I be innocent. All those big people, looking down at me. I knew, somehow, that I could destroy them with one word of the truth.
The truth was, I had cheated. For once. I was supposed to stay by the big rock and count to one hundred. I always had, all the times Maude and I had played. But just that once, I stopped at fifty. I don’t know why. Maybe something had happened that day. Maybe Maude had annoyed me. Or maybe I just made one of those sudden leaps a growing child can make. Whatever the reason, all at once I decided I couldn’t stand to hear Maude crowing Olly olly oxenfree. Not then. Not ever again. So I cheated. Broke a rule. Stopped counting at fifty and tiptoed through the woods the way Maude had gone.
It took a long time. The sun was dipping below the tree tops by the time I found her, and I was starting to wonder if I had made her up, like a story. But then there she was. Lying on the ground. Very pale. Very still. And so small, without her clothes. I knelt down and touched her face. Cold. How could this little person have scooped up all my jacks? How could she have bossed me around? With her child’s body—flat, then rounded at the belly? And her little cleft pubis, like a pensive mouth?
There was blood.
Sometimes I remember the blood seeping out from under the back of Maude’s head. In this memory, my hands are gritty and scratched as if from a rough, heavy stone.
Other times I remember the blood seeping out from between Maude’s thighs. In that memory, my hands are clean.
When Leo leaves, Miranda stands naked in front of her full-length mirror. She can’t remember the last time she looked at herself this way. The biggest change has been to her face. From the neck down, though, she could be—fifty? Younger? She’s kept herself small and trim, so her breasts are just a little lower than they ever were. Her triangle of pubic hair is grey, though. Could it be coloured like the hair on her head, she wonders, with a package of dye from the drugstore? But then wouldn’t she have to keep touching it up, with more dye and Q-tips? What would be the point of that? Who else besides her would ever see?
The whole time, she had known Leo was thinking about his wife. And that had seemed strangely all right. As if some plan were being enacted.
There is a small pair of scissors in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. Once she has snipped off the blood-matted curls and flushed them down the toilet, what is left lies tight and flat like a pelt. She soaps herself and works carefully with her razor. And there they are. The strange little vertical lips she remembers. The air is cold on them, despite the warm day.
In the bath, the water soothes her newly naked skin and penetrates to the soreness inside her. It is over. She has told her story to a living soul. Will the man come for her now? She reaches again for the scissors. Let him.
It was the shoes I saw first. Brogues. Though I didn’t know that word then. I’ve given it to the shoes since. Brown brogues. Standing in the leaves just inches from where Maude lay. Had they just now walked through the leaves? I hadn’t heard any crackle. Or had they been standing there
the whole time, and I was only seeing them now? Like in one of those puzzles that are a picture inside a picture. A gnarled tree trunk that becomes a face if you look at it long enough. There were brown corduroy trousers growing up out of the shoes. A woolen sweater. Nubbly tweed jacket. Cap. And under it the man’s face—all in shadow at first, with the setting sun behind him. But I could tell he was looking at me.
Slowly, he squatted down. I heard his knees crack. He was looking straight into my eyes, and he was very, very serious. He shook his head and said in that hushed, shocked voice that adults save for bad children, “What have you done?”
I have cheated at hide and seek, I thought. My mouth was too dry to say the words aloud. I have broken a rule of the game.
He shook his head, as if he could hear my thoughts, and repeated, “What have you done?”
I have been angry with my friend, I thought. All this time. I have been angry with her for taking my jacks and not giving them back.
Again the head shake. “What have you done?”
I have hated my friend.
No, still not enough. “What have you done?”
I have wished dead the one I loved.
I started to cry then. The man just let me. No comfort. No hand on my shoulder. Not even a clicking tongue.
“Well,” he said when I had run out of tears, “what are you going to do now?”
I don’t know.
“But how are you going to look after things? How are you going to do what needs to be done here?”
I don’t know.
He shook his head and stood up again. He was very tall, taller than before, and his face was in darker shadow. He sighed—that disgusted, pettish sigh adults come out with when a child has spilled something or wet themselves.
“All right,” he said at last. “I guess I’ll have to look after things. I guess I’ll have to do what needs to be done here. This once.” He pointed his finger at me. “But you, young lady, are going to turn around and go back to where you should have been and do what you should have been doing.”
I’m sorry.
“Well, I should hope so.”
As I turned away, I heard his last words. “Don’t you ever come back here. And don’t you ever tell anyone what happened. I’ll know if you do. And I’ll find you. Wherever you are.”
The whole time I was walking back to the stone to resume counting to one hundred from fifty, I kept listening for the man’s footsteps in the leaves. But all I could hear were my own.
The only other phone number the co-op’s building manager has on file for Miranda Shankland is that of the Melville Staines Funeral Home. So it is Felicity Staines who drains the crimson bathwater and says tenderly, “Oh Miranda” before loading and delivering the remains to the crematorium in the basement of the Home.
For the memorial service, Felicity recruits the boys in the basement to transform the Home’s largest guest room into an enchanted forest. Patches of gnarled bark on styrofoam trees become faces if you look at them long enough. There are hollow trunks to hide in and papier-mâché rocks to hide behind. Some tree stumps have games of jacks and snakes-and-ladders set on them. The bewildered attendees—a few of Miranda’s co-op neighbours, the members of the book club and Leo—are invited to go hide-and-seek in the forest or sit and play games while The Teddy Bears’ Picnic plays over and over in the background.
Felicity Staines watches them indulgently as, starting with Leo and Fiona, they comply. Fiona is off work that day because of some nausea that cleared up by late morning. She still does not know she is pregnant, just as Leo does not know that he will finish his book in less than six months and sell it to Dennis Little of Littlepress, based in Stoney Creek. Olly Olly Oxen Free will be a critical hit and a runner-up for both the Biggar Prize and the Olympia Featherstone Award For Fiction. Though it will win neither, the book will lend Leo Van de Veld enough credibility to land a creative-writing teaching position in a local community college. He will discover that he likes teaching. That he’s good at it. That he takes pride in going out the door each morning after kissing Fiona and the baby goodbye.
But all this is in the future. Right now Leo taps his foot to If you go out in the woods today... while Fiona bounces a rubber ball and scoops up all his jacks.
Their daughter, Leonora Van de Veld-McFee, will grow up to be a world-renowned criminologist, specializing in abducted children. Given her parents’ slight connection with Miranda Shankland, she will have a lifelong fascination with Maude’s cold case, and will always wish she could have interviewed the found girl.
And where is the found girl? Specifically, her ashes?
Behind Felicity Staines’ aubergine-lipsticked smile is the memory of mixing them into the paint on the tree trunks, into the paste in the papier-mâché rocks. And behind that is an older memory of lurking, as a child, behind a curtain in one of her father’s guest rooms. Listening to Miranda tell her story.
OCTOPUS HEART
Has Eliot ever said anything about wanting to go to the aquarium? When he unfolds the open ticket Bill Merton has just given him as a belated birthday gift, all he can manage at first is an interested-sounding “Oh!”
He and Bill meet once a month for lunch at the Rendezvous. They worked together for thirty-five years in the finance department of Girls First! and retired within weeks of each other. At both retirement parties they pledged to stay in touch. Then a full year went by before Eliot booted up one morning and saw an email from Bill.
He left it a couple of days before replying. Sure, he had always liked Bill. They had had an unspoken solidarity as male employees of a charity devoted to the education and welfare of underprivileged girls. Sometimes, if they met in the men’s after an AGM, they would grin and greet each other as Token Merton and Token Somers. But he’s not sure he wants to be reminded of the place. He never dropped back into the office for a visit the way he saw so many retirees do over the years. He’d be right in the middle of something but would have to leave it to go greet Old Whoever, then stand in a politely smiling circle, asking the requisite questions about how they were enjoying retirement and pretending interest in the usual replies about how it’s the greatest thing ever. (So what are you doing back here—gloating?)
But this was Bill. And it had been a year. They would hardly be talking shop. So he did reply, and one thing led to another, and now they do lunch once a month at the Rendezvous. It’s a good enough place, right near the subway, equidistant from their condominiums. They have a running joke about ordering the same thing every time—Bill the steak frites, Eliot the moules frites. But hell. It’s what they want. And it’s their pension they toiled away for all those years.
Their conversation follows a pattern too. Anything new? What are you reading? Did you catch that game? See that movie? And can you believe what some celebrity or politician has just said or done? They don’t get personal. Or not often. Eliot knows Bill is childless and divorced, his ex-wife married now to another woman. Bill knows Eliot’s wife doesn’t recognize him any more when he visits her, and his daughter hasn’t spoken to him in years. At some point each would have offered up his particulars, and the other mumbled, Sorry to hear that.
Eliot doesn’t remember when they started acknowledging each other’s birthdays. One of them would have let slip that he had turned seventy or whatever that last month, so the other would have insisted on picking up the lunch tab. So the birthday boy would have demanded to know his host’s birth date, in order to return the favour. Then at some point one of them would have maybe handed a paperback book to the other—nothing expensive and certainly not wrapped—just something he thought the other might get a kick out of. And so at the next birthday lunch there would have been another modest gift handed across the table. Which is how Eliot has come to be looking at a printout of a ticket—just folded, not tucked inside a card—that will admit him to the aquarium once any time thi
s year.
“You’ve gotta go.” Bill has just finished describing his own visit, how his niece and her husband asked him to go along with them, last time they were in Toronto. His cheeks are flushed, and Eliot knows that’s as much about the invitation as the outing. “Trust me. Even if you don’t give a damn about fish. You won’t believe what you’re seeing.”
The ticket has almost expired by the time Eliot uses it. He finally goes because he has to get out, has to clear his head. The aquarium will be a whole new thing. No associations. And he doubts he’ll bump into anyone he knows.
He cancelled the Rendezvous lunch for this month—October—claiming a bout of the flu but in fact wanting to avoid Bill’s questioning looks. Though he’s not hurting nearly as much these days, his walk is still not quite right and he has to be careful sitting down. Not that Bill would actually ask. But he himself might be tempted to unload. The whole thing has left him kind of unstable. And if he got emotional, neither of them would know where to look.
It took him weeks to make an appointment with the specialist his GP was urging him to see. It’s not going to get better, Eliot. It’s only going to get worse. Even more frightening than the symptoms—the bleeding, and that hard spike of tissue that protruded agonizingly whenever he moved his bowels—was the thought of what the diagnosis might be. But when he finally did see the specialist, the man shrugged and said, Sounds like a rectal fissure. Very common. We can fix that right here and now.
Not cancer after all? Surgery all of a sudden? It left him without defences. He blubbered “Get out! Get out!” during the speculum probe and the needle. And afterwards, waiting on the curb for a cab, feeling the freezing already giving way, he searched the faces of strangers for kindness. Comfort.
He didn’t sleep that night, migrating back and forth between his bathtub and his bed, where he could only hunker on his knees, rubbing his crotch in fruitless self-soothing and gobbling pain pills like candy. Toward dawn he fell into a doze and dreamed about Jill for the first time in years. She was perched at the end of the bed, shaking her head and saying, I tried to tell you, Eliot. I did try to tell you. He was paralyzed in the dream, and the bed was a hospital bed. Jill had been called in as a kind of therapist. Patiently, methodically, she placed her palms on him here and there. Whatever she touched began to tingle back to life.