Lost Girls

by Andrew Pyper

  Try to keep reading but the light’s already fading, the fire big enough to warm a yellow circle before it but no longer bright enough to read by. Check all the pockets, but no. Didn’t bring my coke. I’ve gone all day and until this moment hadn’t thought of it, and now that I have I expect at any second to begin the sweating, burn-headed process of becoming chemically upset, but nothing happens. Outside, the dark of early winter evening falls across the glass as a purple curtain.

  I dream of my father. Working at his desk with books splayed open on top of each other, holding selected pages to the air. Lifts his head to smile at someone he hadn’t realized was there. Walking across the room to where my mother stands against a window stippled with rain. Kisses her once, steps back, raises his hand. Then carefully begins drawing on my mother’s mouth with his pen, coloring her red lips blue with ink.

  I’m awakened by the cold. The fire now nothing but a circle of papery embers, a single pair of red eyes still glowing out. The room poured full of night. Feel around the floor at my feet for more wood but it’s either all been used or is further than I can reach. The air a vapor of wet smoke that would make you choke if it weren’t so cold. Sit unmoving in the dark for a time, a ball in my throat I can’t swallow away and the dried crust of sleeping tears below my eyes.

  It takes three attempts before I finally get to my feet. Everything held stiff like a plastic doll with moveable parts but only if you make them, one at a time.

  Must be awake. You can’t feel an upturned beer cap screw into the sole of your foot in a dream. You don’t bend down to pull it off with a smear of your own blood that you lick from your fingers without thinking, leaving the taste of rust and crunch of sand on your tongue. The click of rodents’ feet scuttling through the papers on the kitchen floor behind me.

  Takes half the night to lift my head up straight enough to look out the window, squint down to the scissored line of trees around the body of the lake. No wind and nothing moves. It could be a painting. A flea market oil canvas where all the colors come from some combination of perfect blue and black. I think of how often Nature presents itself as cheap art, nothing more than the paintings over Holiday Inn beds. Sunsets, distant hills, the subtle degrees of night. It could all just be a picture if nothing ever moved.

  Then something moves.

  The bloom of fear in my chest before anything else, before I blink my eyes dry to make sure. Something standing, pulling up crooked and pale from the lake’s edge. Faceless but facing me. A single blanched figure under the starless dome of night.

  Rising up from the weeds that grow out of the sediment along the shore and squishing onto the mud, the thin grass that aprons the jutting stones and roots. Up the slope toward my place at the window, legs brushing through the grass, its shape enlarging with every step. Slow as the scream in your throat that could wake you from a dream if it could find its way out.

  So cold.

  The sound it makes fractures over the lake, through the woods, the walls, so that it comes from all places at once. A woman’s voice that could be a half-mile off or whispered in my ear.

  When it reaches the top of the slope and pauses in the tall grass that reaches to its waist I shut my eyes hard, think for a moment of escape, of turn and hide. But the order doesn’t go out. Nothing works.

  The watery slide of bare feet on the deck outside coming to a stop outside the door. Then for a time there’s no sound at all.

  When I open my eyes I move forward to the window but I can’t see around its frame to whatever may be there. Wait for the doorknob to turn, for its hands on my throat, the knowing crack of its laughter. But there’s only my own warm air blown blue over the glass.

  I’m so cold.

  I don’t want to. I’d rather wish myself into a dream, into a hidden thing that watches from the corner. But I know I won’t do anything now but float away from the window, cast the shadow of my hand across the wall to open the door.

  Please.

  Standing there. A young woman with long hair smoothed over bare shoulders, water beading down over the perfect white of her stomach, her arms. Candied freckles across her chest. Hair covering the whole of her face except for lips puffed blue with cold.

  Hold me.

  And I do.

  Pull her icy skin to me, the bones light within her. Breathing in her skin until I’m full. All of it real as pain. Real as touch, the taste of copper and salt tears on my mouth.

  When I stand back she raises her hand and lifts the blonde strands away from her face. Ashen, pleading, and something else. Eyes fixed on mine, mouth parted at soft corners. Something like mercy. A face in its shape and features not unlike my own.

  FORTY-FOUR

  It’s only just past eleven according to the illuminated clock outside Steele’s Funeral Home by the time I make it back to town and park the Lincoln in its place in front of the hotel. There’s nothing left to do but go inside but I can’t move toward the door. Bend back my head and look up at the dark windows, the gargoyle heads of the founding fathers, the dripping letters of The Empire’s electric sign. Then I walk.

  Just like one of the stupefied street mumblers I’ve watched passing below the honeymoon suite’s window, talking to myself loud enough that I can hear but if one were to pass beside me they’d catch only discrete syllables, left to wonder at what the smartly dressed young man in the mud-stained overcoat could be saying to himself. Traffic braking hard as he crosses against the lights, hands rising to his mouth as though he believed a cigarette might be wedged between his fingers but when they got there they were empty, so instead he rubs them over his lips, over the words that pass through them, out and up into the air.

  Caroline Rosemary Crane.

  I used to love saying her name. Caroline, with the “i” always long, because to make it short left it sounding like crinoline, a sweat-stained, mothballed Sunday hat pulled from an attic trunk. But Caroline with the “i” long created a sound roughly equivalent to the idea of girl. The echo of a song in its three syllables, an age-old lyric not yet faded from memory.

  I say her name aloud.

  A plastic captain’s telescope that showed a tumbling kaleidoscope of painted sand.

  A set of watercolors used to paint a fairy landscape on the wall over my bed.

  A train set that never worked.

  It was summer. Me and Caroline. Limbs loose and achy from swimming, long walks into town to buy some indigestible licorice or sugar crystals that exploded painfully on the tongue, lying out on the dock, whispering meaningful nonsense to each other in the sun that made us drunk. Our skin reaching a brownness that left us perfect, smooth as peanut butter. Freckles across Caroline’s nose that, if stared at too long, caused prickles behind the eyes.

  Somewhere in the background, so far off that only their voices could reach us were our parents. Two sets of Cranes, Patricia & Stephen and Liddy & Richard, polished and lucky and content. Donning silly aprons (PROFESSORS DO IT…ACADEMICALLY!) to cook meals for the six of us but making enough for twelve. Grown-up couples that kissed on the lips, threw arms around waists, squeezed bums. Sometime after four the drinks appearing in congratulations for having spent another day in the place they thought about the rest of the year and being able to forget about their children, off playing secret games in the trees. Nobody much bothered that they were first cousins and quite evidently in love.

  Once or twice I pass someone lifting a garbage can to the curb or opening the side door to let the cat in, but the sidewalks are mine alone. A town of drawn curtains, blue TV light flickering behind them, old sofas and tricycles collected on front porches. The smell of smoking fat and boiled bones. The insulated vibrations of marital argument. All of it falling away, the last leaves the wind pulls from the tree.

  We rarely saw each other outside of Christmas, Thanksgiving and those six weeks every summer. The sole explanation for this was that we went to different schools. She had her friends, I had mine. Ground to be lost if we turned our back
s on our home turf for a moment. We imagined we belonged to distant, unbridgeable worlds.

  It’s ridiculous now, of course, given that my parents and Caroline’s lived in nearly identical neighborhoods only three subway stops apart in Toronto. Although our place was regarded as “downtown” and their’s “uptown,” you’d have a hard time telling them apart just from walking their streets. Houses like the ones I walk by now. Brick cubes containing families, mini-societies existing within the boundaries of a three-bedroom, 1 ½-bath fortress, the walls protecting the valuables within, if not love then at least privacy. That’s where I grew up, where Caroline Rosemary Crane grew up: in red brick, no nonsense, single-family-dwelling Ontario. Where the streets are named after British generals and the neighborhoods little more than consistent rows of distinct privacies, families separated from each other by politeness and indifference and the cold.

  All around me Murdoch sends its children to bed.

  It was my idea.

  Our parents a little drunk in the luxurious way of those who know that no real harm will come from their drinking, that this is their just reward for being born with the right name at the right time and with enough brains to capitalize on it. Uncle Stephen stumbling around at the barbecue with the tin of lighter fluid held above his head and everyone thinking that surely this time he will light himself into flames, they even say so out loud, laughing. My parents and Aunt Patricia rolling cold gin-and-tonics over their brows, looking out across the water from their fold-out canvas chairs as though a show were about to begin. And it was. In fact the setting of the sun had already begun, lazy and hesitant in the way of August afternoons.

  We liked the way our parents were at this time of day but never said so. Instead, what I whispered into Caroline’s ear as we let the screen door slam behind us was “They’re going to start necking soon if we don’t get out of here.”

  A canoe ride before dinner. Permission from our parents like taking candy from a baby after a couple of stiff Gordon’s. But of course they couldn’t leave it at that, according to the adult tradition of always saying too much. It could never only be Have fun! or Don’t be too late, we’ll be eating soon! There had to be embarrassment. So as we push ourselves out into the water they’re calling after us with their stupid joke of the season that they all find so hilarious.

  “Kissin’ cuzzins!”

  Ringing out from each of them it seems, as though they’d come up with it for the very first time on their own.

  “Kissin’ cuzzins!”

  Big laughs and glasses raised high in salute as we cut into the patterned ripples of the wind.

  At first we head toward the island. Our standard adventure is to climb the cliff peeking out from the trees at its center and take in the view. Kiss in the name of marked occasions. Maybe kiss for a while after that for its own sake. But I decide that today’s the day for a new destination. The beaver dam at the lake’s far end where there are no cottages, no sunhats or beer bellies waving at us from their docks.

  Caroline telling me she’s going to miss me after the summer ends, that she wishes it never would. Tell her I know what she means. But what I don’t tell her is that I already miss her. That days like this are gone even as they happen.

  We pull the canoe in at the opening to the beaver’s stream, plunge bare feet into the muck. When we reach it I walk out onto the dam (I have to, we’ve come here for a show of boyish courage after all) and Caroline tells me to get off it (she has to, she’s come here to protest shows of boyish courage after all). I tell her the beaver won’t mind, he’s left this place to build another. She asks me if this is true and I tell her it is, grateful she didn’t ask how I could tell. Above us the sun falling in a three-count. A cloud of fireflies emerging from the trees. The desire for a kiss.

  I take us back out on the water far enough that the mosquitoes think twice about following. In our wake the water whirlpools then flattens again so that after a second or two you’d never know anything had just passed through it. Caroline so beautiful and I tell her so. Tell her twice and it’s the truth.

  Knees astride, leaning forward to meet her lips. A kiss that’s meant to be different, to communicate solemn, adult intentions. Eyes closed in the living dream of her skin.

  She was Caroline. She was the dark-nippled girl ripped out of a basement bookshelf National Geographic and kept between mattress and bed frame. She was that poster of Marilyn Monroe in a sequined evening gown, eyelashes lowering as though a drug were taking effect. She was my Aunt Patricia stepping out of the lake from a late-night skinny-dip, pushing her arms through a bathrobe left in a pile on the pale stones. Not women but a single, shifting composite. Desire as a slide show viewed from too close for all the particulars to be visible at once.

  But she was real.

  She wanted to be a vet when she got older. She sang solo soprano in her school choir and won silver at the Kiwanis music festival in grade eight. She was so ticklish the mere mention of the word and the waving of spidery fingers before her eyes would bring on a reflex of laughter, then screams for help, then tears. She was clumsy and broke many glasses, grape Kool-Aid left in a pool of Martian blood on the floor. She could swim like an otter, slipping below the surface and breaking through forty feet away, water beading off her skin as though she were coated in an invisible oil. She had secrets—staying up late to watch her parents have sex “like hogs” from their bedroom doorway, discovering the blood of her first period trickling down her legs at a pool party with boys in attendance, cheating on her final math exam with the formulas written at the top of her thighs—and shared them all with me.

  But in the canoe that afternoon she wasn’t even there. In her place someone silent and yielding, a mannequin with cleverly warmed surfaces. I wished for her stillness and she gave it to me. Yet for the time I hovered and pressed and searched I wouldn’t have known her name. I wouldn’t have known my own.

  When it finally arrives the sound of her fear comes from across the lake. It comes from underground.

  Her body plank-stiff but fists pounding against the sides, water lapping in and collecting in a luminous green pool at the bottom. Told her I’d stop. And did, shushing her with promises and hey, heys and sorries. Moved as far back as I could go to let her sit up but instead she did the one thing you’re always told never to do in a canoe. She stood up.

  When I make it back to the air it takes me a second to realize Caroline isn’t beside me. A second more to think of what to do.

  Then I’m under. So deep there’s no way I’ll make it back with only this one held breath but I can tell she’s there just below me, her movements a buffeting current against my skin. Grab her arm with eyes closed and start to kick the other way. But she’s heavy. Heavier than she should be, as though attached to a sack of wet sand. A dozen sacks of wet sand.

  It’s then that I feel a tug from below. Pulling Caroline down. I know this, I’m certain it’s true, there’s no question about it, it might have been nothing. A weed licking about Caroline’s ankle that a single pull could have freed her from. A twinge of cramp in my legs. Something alive from below taking her for itself.

  Whatever it is it’s strong enough to finally pull her from my grasp. That, or I let her go after a swift calculation of time and distance and possibility. Reach for her again but she’s gone deeper—I’ve floated up—and I can’t find her hand.

  I tell myself not to. That it will be too horrible and do no good and I will never be able to forget. But I do anyway. I look.

  Both our eyes open to each other. Mine to glimpse her bloodless face pull into the dark. Hers to watch the shadow of her cousin kicking up toward the dancing light at the surface.

  That fall I started back at school but my friends from the year before could tell right away that something was wrong. High school kids can sniff out emotional disturbance using the same instincts with which hunting animals smell fear in lesser creatures. Within days concern (“Hey, Crane, are you O.K.? You seem weird”) ha
d shifted to aggressive curiosity (“What the fuck is wrong with you, man?”) and then finally hardened into strict isolation. I could clear a cafeteria table as I approached with my tray of synthetic cheeseburger and fries with the effectiveness of a putrefying leper or grinning airport evangelist seeking converts. Hallways widened before me. The walk to the bus stop now free of flirtation, shared cigarettes and rumor. And with this standing outside of things I came to hate them. The good-looking ones with a genetic license for casual cruelty, the rich ones with lazy eyes already bored by unquestioned privilege, the clever ones with an obsessive pursuit of good grades which left them like the seals at Marineland, performing tricks in order to have dead herrings tossed into their mouths by whistle-blowing keepers. Each one of them deserving it in their particular way.

  Not that I’ve been antisocial as an adult. That wouldn’t be practical, given that one must deal with people in order to get things done. I simply decided to despise them all so viciously I wouldn’t even let them see it. Like magic. Or science. A simple, terrible equation: If you hate the rest of the world long enough, eventually you can make it disappear. Or make yourself disappear. One or the other.