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