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 had 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.